Yandex warned about the risks of a shortage of Nvidia video cards for the development of AI and drones

Yandex’s projects to develop drones and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies may be hampered by a shortage of Nvidia graphics processors (GPUs). This topic was discussed in January at a meeting with representatives of the Ministry of Digital Development and the government, reports Vedomosti with reference to sources.

According to one of them, a Yandex representative warned about the problem back in December 2022. The company uses Nvidia A100 chips in supercomputers to operate the Alice voice assistant, the Yandex.Cloud cloud platform, stream translation of foreign-language videos, and other tasks.

One of the interlocutors of Vedomosti said that in the spring of 2022, Yandex was supposed to receive a large batch of Nvidia devices, but the delivery failed amid the military operation in Ukraine. The import of these devices is possible only through parallel import, but it is difficult to import chips in the volumes that Yandex needs.

Another source of the publication said that the mechanisms that will allow Yandex to continue working with foreign vendors who have left Russia have been “repeatedly discussed at various levels.” The Ministry of Digital Development did not comment on the information.

Nvidia has been working in Russia since 2003. She suspended sales in Russia in March 2022. In July the company stopped renew and sell licenses to Russian companies for their cloud gaming software. In November, Nvidia officially gone From Russia.

Details – in the material “Kommersant FM” “Nvidia has dotted the i”.

Laura Keffer