Reading guide:1month8According to a number of media news,Nvidia will resume China's "special version"AI chip shipments in the second quarter,But Tencent、Alibaba and other big customers are not very interested。
Pictured: Jensen Huang
Nvidia plans to begin mass production of a Chinese-designed AI chip in the second quarter of 2024 to comply with U.S. export rules, according to two people familiar with the matter. One of the people familiar with the matter said that initial production will be limited and Nvidia will mainly meet orders from large customers.
It is reported that the chip that Nvidia hopes to request TSMC to deliver first in the form of a "super urgent order" may be H20, and among the three chips developed for the Chinese market after facing regulations, the H20 specification is the most powerful.
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), China's largest cloud company began testing H20 samples provided by Nvidia in November last year. However, according to sources, Alibaba and Tencent have indicated to Nvidia that the chips ordered in 2024 will be far less than planned before the new US ban was announced.
According to the report, due to fears that the United States may tighten restrictions again, China's major customers are reluctant to spend large money on a downgraded H20 and instead turn to testing and sourcing alternatives from domestic manufacturers.
Figure: Schematic
According to some analysts, in the short term, the gap between Nvidia's downgraded GPU and China's local alternatives has narrowed, enhancing the attractiveness of domestic chips to customers of cloud computing and AI large models.
According to the news, Alibaba and Tencent have decided to transfer some orders to Huawei and other companies, and rely more on their own ASICs. Baidu and ByteDance have also taken the same action.
In the long term, Chinese customers are worried about whether Nvidia can continue to supply chips after the Washington authorities have vowed to regularly check chip export controls and may temporarily tighten restrictions, the sources noted. These big companies have begun to prepare for Nvidia's shrinking supply so that they don't have to spend money on technology adjustments to accommodate new chips. That could mean that Nvidia is ceding a multibillion-dollar annual market.
Figure: Huawei's computing power card
Analysts from TrendForce, a well-known semiconductor consulting agency, pointed out that about 80% of China's cloud companies currently purchase high-end AI chips from NVIDIA, and this proportion may drop to 50~60% in the next five years.
According to the news, Huawei will receive a pre-order of at least 5,000 Ascend 910B chips from a major customer in China in 2023, and after testing, the latter is regarded as the closest Chinese version of the Nvidia A100 replacement. Deliveries of the Ascend 910B are expected to begin in 2024, but Huawei is still facing limited production capacity due to U.S. sanctions.