Nvidia H20 China Pushback
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
11 minutes ago
- The Hill
Trump's chip deal raises legal questions
The two firms have agreed to share 15 percent of the revenue generated from selling advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China in order to secure export licenses after a months-long pause, a U.S. official confirmed to The Hill on Monday. 'It's bizarre in many respects and pretty troubling because Congress didn't have anything to say about this,' said Gary Hufbauer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 'It's just the president's own negotiating with the individual companies,' he continued. 'That's not how, historically, we've done business in this country.' Under the agreement, Nvidia will share 15 percent of its revenue from H20 chip sales to China, while AMD will share the same portion of its MI308 chip sales. Both of the Nvidia and AMD chips in question, which are graphics processing units (GPUs) designed for the Chinese market with U.S. export controls in mind, faced new restrictions from the Trump administration in April, effectively blocking sales to China. Last month, Nvidia and AMD said the U.S. government had assured them it would begin approving export licenses for the H20 and MI308 chips, although the Commerce Department reportedly did not start issuing licenses for several weeks. The new revenue-sharing agreement comes after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met with President Trump at the White House last week, according to Bloomberg. Huang has found himself in a tricky situation, balancing Washington and Beijing's interests as both countries vie for AI dominance. The agreement appears to remove a major impediment for both companies. Nvidia said earlier this year it incurred $4.5 billion in charges associated with the chip restrictions in the first quarter and expected an $8 billion sales hit in the second quarter. AMD forecast a $1.5 billion hit to revenue this year. The deal represents a notable shift in how the government approaches export controls. 'It's quite extraordinary because it turns the export control function of the government into a money-raising proposition, and that's never happened before,' Hufbauer said.
CBS News
12 minutes ago
- CBS News
Zelenskyy on Trump-Putin summit: "Talks about us, without us, will not work" for Ukraine
Russia has signaled to the U.S. that it may be willing to end the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters Tuesday. "We had a call with President Trump and with some European leaders. During the call, there was a signal from Mr. Witkoff, who was also on the call, that Russia is ready to end the war — ready for a first step, at least, toward a ceasefire," Zelenskyy said, referencing U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff. "And that this is the first such signal from them." However, Zelenskyy also warned that "talks about us, without us, will not work," ahead of President Trump's one-on-one summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska scheduled for Friday. The call involving Zelenskyy, Mr. Trump and Witkoff took place last week, a spokesperson for Zelenskyy's office told CBS News Tuesday. While Zelenskyy said "everyone on the call" was encouraged by what was viewed as a "shift" in Russia's position, the Ukrainian leader said Ukraine will not, under any circumstances, withdraw its forces from the Russian-occupied Donbas region in the east of Ukraine. "Our territories are illegally occupied. For the Russians, Donbas is a springboard for a future new offensive. If we leave Donbas of our own accord or under pressure, we will invite a third war," Zelenskyy said. The summit between Mr. Trump and Putin is the first in-person meeting between Putin and a sitting U.S. president since Russia invaded Ukraine. It was described as "a listening exercise for the president," by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt Tuesday. "Only one party that's involved in this war is going to be present, and so this is for the president to go and to get, again, a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end," Leavitt said. It is widely expected that Putin will demand that Ukrainian forces withdraw from all parts of Ukraine's Donbas region —parts of which Russian forces held since the country's 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula. Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the area under Russian occupation has increased, though Ukrainian forces do currently hold territory in parts of Donetsk, a province located within the Donbas. Ahead of Mr. Trump's meeting with Putin, a spokesperson for Zelenskyy's office has confirmed to CBS News that he will attend a virtual meeting Wednesday with Mr. Trump and European leaders to discuss the war. Speaking to reporters in the White House briefing room Monday, Mr. Trump expressed optimism that his meeting with Putin will be "constructive," and said that he is planning to establish an in-person meeting involving Putin and Zelenskyy. "The next meeting will be with Zelenskyy and Putin or Zelenskyy and Putin and me," Mr. Trump said. Two sources familiar with those negotiations told CBS News Tuesday that the U.S. is working on a site for a Trump-Putin-Zelenskyy meeting as soon as the end of next week. But Zelenskyy was adamant in his remarks Tuesday that no such meeting should take place without the involvement of European leaders. "The presence of Europe in one form or another is very important, because ultimately, so far, no one but Europe has provided us with security guarantees," he said. As for Mr. Trump's meeting with Putin in Alaska, Zelenskyy said that the meeting would only benefit one person— the Russian leader. "I believe that Putin will benefit from this, because what he is seeking, frankly, is photographs. He needs a photo from a meeting with President Trump," Zelenskyy said. "Ukrainian issues should be discussed by at least three parties."Jennifer Jacobs contributed to this report.
WIRED
14 minutes ago
- WIRED
AOL Will Shut Down Dial-Up Internet Access in September
Benj Edwards, Ars Technica Aug 12, 2025 6:55 PM The move will pinch users in rural or remote areas not yet served by broadband infrastructure or satellite internet. Around 175,000 households still use dial-up internet in the US. A logo for America Online photographed in the early 2000s, when the company provided internet access for millions of people over phone lines. Photograph:After decades of connecting US subscribers to its online service and the internet through telephone lines, AOL recently announced it is finally shutting down its dial-up modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marks the end of a technology that served as the primary gateway to the web for millions of users throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. AOL confirmed the shutdown date in a help message to customers: "AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans." Along with the dial-up service, AOL announced it will retire its AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser on the same date. The dialer software managed the connection process between computers and AOL's network, while Shield was a web browser optimized for slower connections and older operating systems. AOL's dial-up service launched as "America Online" in 1991 as a closed commercial online service, with dial-up roots extending back to Quantum Link for Commodore computers in 1985. However, AOL didn't provide actual internet access yet: The ability to browse the web, access newsgroups, or use services like gopher launched in 1994. Before then, AOL users could only access content hosted on AOL's own servers. When AOL finally opened its gates to the internet in 1994, websites were measured in kilobytes, images were small and compressed, and video was essentially impossible. The AOL service grew alongside the web itself, peaking at over 25 million subscribers in the early 2000s before broadband adoption accelerated its decline. According to 2022 US Census data, approximately 175,000 American households still connect to the internet through dial-up services. These users typically live in rural areas where broadband infrastructure doesn't exist or remains prohibitively expensive to install. For these users, the alternatives are limited. Satellite internet now serves between 2 million and 3 million US subscribers split between various services, offering speeds far exceeding dial-up but often with data caps and higher latency. Traditional broadband through DSL, cable, or fiber-optic connections serves the vast majority of US internet users but requires infrastructure investments that don't always make economic sense in sparsely populated areas. The persistence of dial-up highlights the ongoing digital divide in the United States. While urban users enjoy gigabit fiber connections, some rural residents still rely on the same technology that powered the internet of 1995. Even basic tasks like loading a modern webpage—designed with the assumption of broadband speeds—can take minutes over a dial-up connection, or sometimes it doesn't work at all. The gap between dial-up and modern internet connections is staggering. A typical dial-up connection delivered 0.056 megabits per second, while today's average fiber connection provides 500 Mbps—nearly 9,000 times faster. To put this in perspective, downloading a single high-resolution photo that loads instantly on broadband would take several minutes on dial-up. A movie that streams in real time on Netflix would require days of downloading. But for millions of Americans who lived through the dial-up era, these statistics tell only part of the story. The Sound of the Early Internet For those who came online before broadband, dial-up meant a specific ritual: clicking the dial button, hearing your modem dial a local access number, then listening to the distinctive handshake sequence—a cacophony of static, beeps, and hissing that indicated your computer was negotiating a connection with AOL's servers. Once connected, users paid by the hour or through monthly plans that offered limited hours of access. The technology worked by converting digital data into audio signals that traveled over standard telephone lines, originally designed in the 19th century for voice calls. This meant users couldn't receive phone calls while online, leading to countless family disputes over internet time. The fastest consumer modems topped out at 56 kilobits per second under ideal conditions. AOL didn't invent dial-up internet access, but the company perfected the art of making it accessible to non-technical users. Where competitors required users to understand concepts like PPP settings and TCP/IP configurations, AOL provided a single software package that handled everything. Users just needed to insert one of the billions of CD-ROMs the company mailed out, install the software, and click 'Connect.' The company's cultural impact extended far beyond mere connectivity. AOL Instant Messenger introduced many users to real-time digital communication. Chat rooms created some of the internet's first social networks. The famous "You've Got Mail" notification became so iconic that it was a title for a 1998 romantic comedy. For better or worse, AOL keywords trained a generation to navigate the web through corporate-curated portals rather than open searching. Over the years, Ars Technica documented numerous dial-up developments and disasters that plagued AOL users. In 2015, 83-year-old Ron Dorff received phone bills totaling $24,298.93 after his AOL modem started dialing a long-distance number instead of a local access point—a problem that had plagued users since at least 2002, when New York's attorney general received more than 50 complaints about similar billing disasters. The financial risks weren't limited to technical mishaps: AOL itself contributed to user frustration by repeatedly adjusting its pricing strategy. In 2006, the company raised dial-up rates to $25.90 per month—the same price as broadband—in an attempt to push users toward faster connections. This followed years of subscriber losses that saw AOL's user base fall over time as the company struggled with conflicting strategies that included launching a $10 Netscape-branded service in 2003 while maintaining premium pricing for its main offering. The Infrastructure That Remains AOL's shutdown doesn't mean dial-up is completely dead. Several niche providers like NetZero, Juno, and Dialup 4 Less continue to offer dial-up services, particularly in areas where it remains the only option. In the past, some maintained dial-up connections as a backup connection for emergencies, though many still use it for specific tasks that don't require high bandwidth, like processing credit card payments. The Public Switched Telephone Network that carries dial-up signals still exists, though telephone companies increasingly route calls through modern packet-switched networks rather than traditional circuit-switched systems. As long as traditional phone service exists, dial-up remains technically possible—just increasingly impractical as the web grows more demanding. For AOL, maintaining dial-up service likely became more about serving a dwindling but dependent user base than generating meaningful revenue. The infrastructure requirements, customer support needs, and technical maintenance for such a legacy system eventually outweigh the benefits. The September 30 shutdown date gives remaining dial-up users just over one month now to find alternative internet access—a challenge for those in areas where alternatives don't exist. Some may switch to satellite or cellular services despite higher costs. Others may lose internet access entirely, further widening the digital divide that dial-up, for all its limitations, helped bridge for three decades. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
