Nvidia makes customized version of its H100 chip for China

109
3
Nvidia makes customized version of its H100 chip for China

The Nvidia Corp booth was held at Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. LONG WEI Nvidia, a US-based artificial intelligence chip company, said it has developed a customized version of its flagship product that it can legally export to China despite US government restrictions.

The move shows the importance of the Chinese market to Nvidia, and will allow Chinese companies to access AI chips that are critical to the development of generative AI technologies like OpenAI's ChatGPT and similar products.

Nvidia's move follows the rules put in place by the US government last year, which stopped Nvidia from selling its two most advanced chips, the A 100 and the newer H 100, to Chinese customers due to alleged national security concerns.

Nvidia has developed a China-export version of its H 100 chip, while complying with the restrictions on the country by the US government. It said it enables exports to China despite US curbs, so it didn't elaborate on the finer details of customization.

The H 800 chip is used by the cloud computing units of Chinese internet companies such as Tencent Holdings Ltd, Baidu Inc, and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Many of the young startups that have been building large language models are jumping on the generative AI bandwagon, according to Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. Such firms can look up to Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu that have excellent cloud capabilities thanks to Nvidia's AI.

The H 800 is part of the Nvidia plan to supply alternative products to the Chinese market while complying with the US government's export controls on the country.

The A 800 graphics processing unit, or GPU, which went into production in the third quarter of last year, is another alternative to the A 100 GPU for customers in China.

Despite US government efforts to tighten chip export controls, US semiconductor companies continue to place a great emphasis on the Chinese market, according to Bai Ming, deputy director of international market research at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation.

The logic is simple and clear - the Chinese mainland is too big a market for any chip company to ignore, Bai said.

The Chinese mainland is the world's largest chip market, which consumes more than half of the world's semiconductors, which are then assembled into tech products to be sold or reexported in the domestic market, according to research firm Daxue Consulting.

Huang from Nvidia said last year that China continues to present significant growth opportunities and that cooperation between China and the United States will benefit the world. He noted that China is a big consumer of products originating in the US and a key part of the global supply chain.

In a recent podcast with Financial Times, Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates decried the US sanctions and said he does not think the US will ever be successful in preventing China from having cutting-edge chips.

He said that he doesn't believe that that's a huge benefit, given that they are at scale to catch up fairly quickly.