Since October last year, when the U.S. government began to coerce Nvidia and other major U.S. chip manufacturers to ban the sale of high-performance AI chips to China, Nvidia's engineers immediately took action to redesign new products specifically for the Chinese market, which has met the tightening export regulations of the United States.
Not long after, on December 28, Nvidia put a new graphics card called "RTX4090 D" on its Chinese official website, it is reported that the graphics card is a version launched by Nvidia's restricted RTX4090 to modify some parameters and castrate some functions. Nvidia said that this "RTX4090 D" is specially tailored for the Chinese market, and the "D" means "Dragon", which obviously echoes the meaning of the 2024 Chinese traditional Year of the Dragon, which shows that Nvidia is full of confidence in the market prospects of this graphics card.
However, the ideal is very full, but the reality is quite skinny, Nvidia poured hope into the RTX4090 D, did not usher in the market as expected, many Chinese buyers are not interested in this Nvidia castrated version of the graphics card, there is no intention to actively buy at all, and there are even rumors that Nvidia's old Chinese customers have even begun to turn orders to local AI chip suppliers.
The downgraded version of the GPU market of Nvidia is cold, and the "Yellow Sect Master" miscalculates
In recent years, with the continuous expansion of the AI application market, as a major international AI chip supplier, Nvidia has launched a number of GPU products that have triggered a rush in the market, and for a while, Nvidia has become the "most beautiful boy" among the major chip manufacturers, and its stock price has soared, and in 2023, Nvidia's market value has doubled, becoming the chip company with the highest market value in the world.
However, Nvidia, which has nearly 88% of the global independent display market share, has frequently hit a wall in the export restrictions of the Biden administration in the United States, and a number of high-end AI chips cannot be shipped to Chinese mainland, and the latter, as the world's largest semiconductor chip market, once made Nvidia make a lot of money. As the United States continues to introduce new chip rules, in order to save the Chinese market, Nvidia has to "force Liangshan" and choose to launch a "castrated version" of chips to circumvent the policy restrictions of the United States.
Previously, Nvidia for its release of A100, as well as H100, after castrating part of the performance, remodeled into A800, H800, although the "monkey version" chip performance is lacking, but successfully circumvented the United States export restrictions, still won many orders from Chinese customers. But how long can the United States be comfortable, the United States has revised the export rules again, and Nvidia's castrated version of the A800 and H800 cannot be exported to China.
To this end, Nvidia once again "relied on the gourd to draw the scoop" and continued to launch the "castrated version" of AI chips, but the export restrictions of the United States are becoming more and more stringent, which also means that if Nvidia wants to meet export demand, it must be "castrated" more ruthlessly, and on the other hand, the final chip will have a greater sacrifice in performance. But even so, Nvidia is still unwilling to compromise on price, and it is inevitable that the market will be cold.
Take NVIDIA's new RTX4090 D as an example,The starting price of this GPU is12999element,The price of the previous flagship RTX4090 is no different,But in terms of performance,This NVIDIA"Year of the Dragon special"But it is far from the full-blooded RTX4090,It is reported,After castration performance,This special version of the GPU compared with the flagship,The performance has shrunk by at least 11%.
I have to say that in addition to his extraordinary skills in chip research and development, "Huang Jiaozhu" is even more good at making money.
As everyone knows, the performance has shrunk, the cost performance is not high, NVIDIA's downgraded GPU has chilled many people, and many domestic users have turned to more practical domestic chips.
Jensen Huang: Huawei is a strong opponent of Nvidia in China, and it is difficult to deal with
According to industry insiders, as early as November last year, some large cloud computing companies in China have been testing Nvidia's chip samples, because of performance degradation, it seems that China's top cloud computing, big data companies, for Nvidia's "special" chips are not satisfied, it is reported that Alibaba and Tencent have told Nvidia that the number of chips ordered will be much lower than the original plan.
In response to Nvidia's practice of downgrading chip performance to circumvent the U.S. government's export restrictions, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that in the short term, Nvidia's processor downgrade is narrowing the performance gap between its and China's local competitors, increasing the attractiveness of Chinese-made chips to buyers. According to reliable sources, the original Nvidia customers, represented by Alibaba and Tencent, are gradually transferring some advanced semiconductor orders to local companies such as Huawei, and purchasing more chips designed and developed by themselves.
Although there is still a certain gap between the current technical level of China's semiconductor industry and that of the United States, it is still sufficient to meet the requirements of prediction through trained AI models and undertake less complex training tasks. The domestic performance is more prominent, and the manufacturers with the hard power of GPU products include Huawei.
As a company that has successfully developed and achieved mass production of high-end mobile phone CPU chips, Huawei's performance in the GPU field in recent years has been amazing, and the Ascend 910B chip under Huawei HiSilicon is currently considered to be the closest replacement to the NVIDIA A100 in China. With the reduction of the quality and price of Nvidia's chips sold to China, Huawei's Ascend chips have ushered in a lot of opportunities.
At present, many domestic technology companies are using Huawei chips to train AI models, including the well-known iFLYTEK and 360 companies, among which iFLYTEK has launched a Spark all-in-one machine with Huawei's Ascend chip as the computing power base. In addition, telecom operators such as China Telecom and China Unicom have also purchased some AI servers powered by Huawei chips.
Now, as more Internet manufacturers favor Huawei's AI chips, the Chinese market, which Nvidia has launched to protect its "special supply", is bound to usher in a huge impact. Now, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, known as the godfather of graphics cards, has to admit that Huawei is a strong opponent of Nvidia in China.
For Nvidia, if the U.S. embargo continues, it will neither be able to compete nor be ahead in China, one of the world's largest GPU markets. The long-term restrictions will inevitably force China to develop its own technology, and once China's technology reserves are completed, NVIDIA's Chinese business will inevitably become a victim.