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NVIDIA special edition AI chip


NVIDIA special edition AI chip

According to the latest news, NVIDIA will resume the shipment of "special supply" AI chips in China in the second quarter, but major customers such as Tencent and Alibaba are not interested in it.

Two people familiar with the matter disclosed that NVIDIA plans to start mass production of an AI chip designed for China in the second quarter of 2024 to comply with U.S. export regulations. One of the people familiar with the matter said that the initial output would be limited and NVIDIA would mainly meet the orders of major customers.

It is reported that the chip that NVIDIA hopes to require TSMC to deliver first may be H20. among the three chips developed for the Chinese market after facing the control, H20 specification is the most powerful.

According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), China's larger cloud enterprises began testing H20 samples provided by NVIDIA in last November. However, sources revealed that Alibaba and Tencent have indicated to NVIDIA that the chips ordered in 2024 will be far less than the plan before the new U.S. ban was released.

The report said that due to the fear that the United States might tighten the restrictions again, Chinese major customers were unwilling to spend a lot of money on the degraded H20, instead, they turned to test and sourcing the alternatives of domestic manufacturers.

Some analysts said that in the short term, the gap between NVIDIA's downgraded GPU and China's local alternatives has narrowed, increasing the attractiveness of domestic chips to cloud computing and AI big model customers.

According to the news, Alibaba and Tencent have decided to transfer some orders to Huawei and other companies, and rely more on their own ASIC. Baidu and byte beat also took the same action.

Analysts from TrendForce, a well-known semiconductor consultancy, pointed out that about 80% of high-end AI chips in Chinese cloud enterprises are sourcing to NVIDIA, and this proportion may drop to 50-60% in the next five years.

According to the news, Huawei received a pre-purchase of at least 5,000 shengteng 910B chips from a major Chinese customer in 2023. After testing, the latter is regarded as the Chinese version substitute closest to NVIDIA A100. Shengteng 910B is expected to start delivery in 2024, but Huawei is still facing the dilemma of limited production capacity due to US sanctions.

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