Nio says restrictions on Nvidia chips won't hurt them

Chinese electric vehicle maker Nio has joined others in the industry in saying that US restrictions on sales of Nvidia chips to China will not affect the automaker's business.

 

Last week, Nvidia announced that the US would require the chipmaker to obtain a license for future exports of certain products to China to reduce the risk of their use by the Chinese military.

 

"We believe this will not affect our business operations", — William Lee, founder, chairman and CEO of Nio, said through the company's translator during a call on Wednesday. This is according to the StreetAccount transcript.

 

"We estimate that our computing power is sufficient for the development of autonomous driving technology in the aspect of AI training," Li said. "And we're working very closely with our partner Nvidia."

 

The Nvidia Drive Orin chip has become a core part of autonomous driving technology for Nio and other electric vehicle companies in China. Nvidia's online blog describes how the new Nio ES7 SUV is equipped with four such chips, including one that allows the car to learn based on the driver's individual preferences.

 

The new US restrictions target Nvidia's A100 and H100 products, which are part of the company's much larger data center business. These products are GPUs that can be used for artificial intelligence.

 

Li said on Wednesday that there are many companies in China that make artificial intelligence training chips, and that Nio is evaluating cooperation opportunities with various companies. But he said that US restrictions would not affect Nio's long-term strategy.

 

Last week, automaker Geely said it would not be affected by the new restrictions, as self-driving startups WeRide and Pony.ai did.

 

Earlier this week, Chinese financial news website Caixin reported that He Xiaopeng, chairman of electric vehicle startup Xpeng, said the restrictions would cause problems for learning autonomous driving algorithms on cloud computing platforms.

 

But he said the company has purchased enough high-tech products to meet demand in the coming years. Caixin quoted He's post on his personal WeChat account, which is similar to a private post on Facebook's news feed.