Nvidia, Oracle Race to Get AI Chips Out of U.S. Ahead of New Export Rule

Nvidia and cloud providers such as Oracle are rushing to ship chips and servers to data centers outside the U.S., ahead of a mid-May deadline when a controversial new regulation is scheduled to take effect that will cap their abilities to add new computing capacity in other countries.

Oracle, for example, has taken the unusual move of asking some of its suppliers to ship incomplete products out of the U.S. for assembly overseas. By doing so, it hopes to get more equipment out of the country to ensure that it will not be subject to the new regulation, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Nvidia, meanwhile, has in the past few months, been trying to persuade its customers in Asia to order advanced chips as soon as possible, according to two people who work at distributors of Nvidia chips.