NVIDIA and AMD have entered into an unusual trade agreement that sees them pay a flat 15 percent of their revenues from sales of chips to China to the U.S. Government, to secure export licenses, Bloomberg reports. This payment would naturally see the two raise prices of their chips to Chinese customers, and the move is intended to raise costs for Chinese AI acceleration data-centers, making data-centers in other parts of the world more competitive. This is probably done to blunt the energy cost advantage Chinese cloud computing companies enjoy compared to Western markets. With Moore's Law practically dead, industrial-scale AI acceleration is poised to become an energy intensive operation.

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