Baidu orders 1,600 pieces of Ascend 910B: Nvidia wakes up, this round of sanctions has helped Huawei
Text/Wang Xinxi
According to Reuters, a few days ago, Baidu ordered AI chips worth 450 million yuan from Huawei as a replacement for Nvidia A100 chips, in order to circumvent the export restrictions of high-end chips in the United States in advance and prepare for the inability to import Nvidia A100 chips.
It is reported that the chips are used in 200 servers, and Huawei has delivered more than 1,000 chips to Baidu, about 60%, and plans to complete all deliveries by the end of the year.
1600 chips, worth 450 million, on the one hand, it reflects that AI chips are really valuable, and on the other hand, it also reflects that Nvidia used to be really profitable in China, but at present, Nvidia may have woken up to the fact that this round of sanctions has helped Huawei, and its good days in the Chinese market may have passed.
Baidu orders 1600 pieces of Ascend 910B, what signal is released?
As early as October 17, the Biden administration updated new export control rules for AI chips, preventing companies such as Nvidia from exporting advanced AI chips to China. As soon as the news came out, Nvidia opened with a maximum decline of more than 7.5%, after all, Nvidia's revenue in the Chinese market accounted for up to 47% of its overall global market revenue, which has a great impact. This has also affected domestic companies that used to purchase AI chips from Nvidia.
In the past, domestic computing power, including Baidu, used Nvidia's chips, and the new export ban has made those companies that used to buy chips from Nvidia need to find ways to find alternative chip products. For example, Hongbo shares, Zhongbei Communications, Lotus Health, Capital Online, Industrial Fortune Union, China Power Port, etc. In addition, large technology companies such as Baidu, Huawei, Alibaba, and Tencent, as well as some emerging AI startups, have cooperated with NVIDIA in the field of AI chips.
Previously, it was reported by the media that Chinese Internet giants snapped up Nvidia chips, and orders have been scheduled until 2024. Now in the field of autonomous driving, the highest-end chips equipped with domestic new energy vehicles are basically autonomous driving chips from NVIDIA. In the first quarter of 2023, NVIDIA accounted for 52.57% of the market share of the calculation solutions for passenger cars equipped with NOA functions as standard in the Chinese market.
According to Tianfeng Securities, the Ascend 910B is a semi-generation upgrade of the 910, and its performance is comparable to the Nvidia A100 and exceeds the A800.
Judging from the current situation, A100 and H100 can be used overseas, and A800 and H800 can only be bought in China, which is more than 30% worse performance in terms of parameters, and about half of the actual performance. Huawei's official website shows that on August 16, 2023, Huawei announced that it and Baidu jointly launched the PaddlePaddle + Wenxin Large Model Hardware Ecological Co-creation Plan, and the two sides will jointly promote the adaptation of the Paddle + Wenxin large model on Ascend AI.
Therefore, due to the basis for cooperation, it is logical that Baidu will begin to turn to Huawei to purchase AI chips under the circumstance that Nvidia is restricted. Huawei's order is significant, and although the order volume is small compared to the thousands of chips that have been ordered from Nvidia in the past, there is an important wind behind it that is changing.
Now the industry's observation is that after the ban on computing chips came out on October 7, Huawei's Ascend orders exploded, and there were about 5-10 times more orders than Huawei expected. According to industry insiders, domestic companies that make large models can only use 30 series data, and they can't wait to buy Ascend. Ascend has experienced multiple rounds of price increases, and the quotation of Ascend server manufacturers has increased by 15%-20% compared with before the ban. Huawei's Ascend series raises its full-year target by 40%!
It is an objective fact that there is a gap between the current Ascend chip and NVIDIA's high-performance AI chip in terms of absolute performance, software framework support, and computing power and energy consumption ratio, but this round of sanctions has made Ascend usher in a splash of wealth.
Under the further sanctions of AI chips and the huge domestic demand, more and more Chinese high-tech companies and Internet companies have passively or actively abandoned NVIDIA and purchased Huawei Ascend. In the past, large domestic manufacturers were highly dependent on NVIDIA, and they placed orders for billions and billions of dollars to buy NVIDIA's computing chips, and NVIDIA's stock price continued to rise!
This round of sanctions has helped Huawei, which may become the underlying infrastructure in China's AI field
As mentioned earlier, the current domestic AI chip market is very large, and many companies need orders, because Nvidia is restricted, and the shortage of computing power has become a consensus. It is reported that the official website of Alibaba Cloud A100 has been suspended for rent, due to the strong demand for computing power and tight supply, Alibaba Cloud has no goods available for rent.
But domestic substitution, and in this field, Huawei is almost the only one. According to estimates, after the upgrade of NVIDIA's restrictions, the new market space for AI domestic chips will be 70 billion+ in 2024.
Therefore, this will further stimulate Huawei's Ascend industry chain and strengthen the trend of domestic substitution. Among them, the computing power foundation supports the overall technological transformation and development, which is an important cornerstone, and computing power leasing may continue to strengthen.
In the past, because of NVIDIA's strong position in the field of AI chips, it was difficult for Huawei Ascend to grab orders, but now, Nvidia is restricted, and Huawei has ushered in an opportunity.
In general, this round of sanctions has helped Huawei, as expected, Nvidia will become more and more panicked next, AI chip localization substitution is unstoppable, from the trend of the next few years, it is estimated that from China to the United States, many people in the industry will be aware of a major problem, this round of sanctions from the final effect, it has helped Huawei break through, so that chip companies including Nvidia and Qualcomm are also constantly losing orders and losing the market.
From the perspective of the AI chip market, Huawei's Ascend processors have begun to be purchased by Internet manufacturers, and everyone has begun to have concerns.
As a leading domestic computing power company, with the increase in the total demand for computing power brought about by the growth of orders and technological progress, and the localization trend brought about by the competition between China and the United States, Huawei is expected to win the competition in the domestic computing power industry with its comprehensive advantages, and its industry chain partners will also rise as a result. Huawei is likely to become the lowest level of infrastructure in China's AI field, and we will wait and see.
Author: Wang Xinxi, Senior Reviewer of TMT This article is not reproduced without permission