AMD’s Export-Friendly Radeon AI PRO R9700 GPU Prepares for China Debut

According to the latest rumor mill, AMD is preparing Radeon AI PRO R9700, a new GPU designed specifically for the Chinese market. The new Radeon AI PRO R9700 GPU will feature deliberately handicapped performance parameters that comply with the most recent US export regulations while still supporting the local industry’s needs for tasks such as on-device inference and model fine-tuning. To adhere to Washington’s restrictions, AMD has reduced the chip’s compute throughput to remain below the critical threshold for controlled exports, yet it retains 32 GB of high-bandwidth frame buffer memory and full PCIe Gen 5 connectivity. These specifications are intended to ensure efficient data transfer, and when multiple R9700 cards are deployed together, they can deliver substantial processing capability despite the lower power per card.

This China-specific strategy follows a challenging period for AMD in that region, including an $800 million charge related to its MI308 accelerator after it was blocked under earlier rules. NVIDIA has also suffered, losing an estimated $5.5 billion in revenue when its H20 series was barred, and seeing its Chinese market share drop from roughly 90 percent in 2021 to about 50 percent today. These developments have created an opening for AMD to compete on both price and supply reliability. AMD’s approach mirrors NVIDIA’s release of a restricted-performance version of its Blackwell-architecture B20 GPU for China. Priced more competitively than previous China-compliant offerings, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 will arrive in the third quarter of 2025 alongside NVIDIA’s B20. AMD intends to present its full AI silicon roadmap at the Advancing AI Summit on June 12, positioning the R9700 as a targeted solution for enterprises and research institutions rather than for hyperscale cloud environments.