According to a report by Huanqiu.com on January 8, "Nvidia's new dilemma in China: customers don't want its downgraded chips." On January 7, local time, the Wall Street Journal reported on the latest status quo of the American technology giant Nvidia wanting to sell its lower-performance AI chips to Chinese buyers in response to the Biden administration's export restrictions, but Chinese customers are not interested. It has to be said that in the context of the United States tightening restrictions on Chinese chips, Nvidia previously joined forces with two other chip giants, Intel and Qualcomm, to put pressure on the White House, but the result was ineffective, and Nvidia was forced to give up selling two of the most advanced AI chips A100 and H100 to China under pressure, and instead launched alternatives, that is, the "China special version" A800 and H800 chips that meet the US export rules, and now Nvidia is ready to supply China after its flagship chip "RTX 4090" is off the shelves RTX 4090 D", although the "D" stands for Dragon, as a way to cater to the Chinese Year of the Dragon. It seems to be very intentional, but it is not at all.
We note that the AI chip has significantly reduced its performance, which is tantamount to a "eunuch chip", which is obviously an insult to Chinese companies, and continuing to accept it will only show that the Chinese are good at bullying. Not only that, if Chinese companies continue to purchase such chips, there will also be a risk of being forced to accept other "castrated version" chips, which will not only be limited in their own product technology, but will also passively adjust the corresponding technology due to the use of new chips many times, and then waste more energy and funds, and the gains outweigh the losses.
More importantly, the current times have changed, and it is precisely because of the suppression by the United States everywhere that China's chip industry has accelerated innovation and research and development, and China has also made amazing achievements in the field of chips, such as the previous Huawei Mate60 The Pro mobile phone equipped with the Kirin 9000s chip was born, which hit the US Secretary of Commerce Raimondo, who was visiting China at the time, so that in recent times, Raimondo has either threatened chip giants such as Nvidia not to sell advanced chips to China, or shouted to the US Congress for money to prevent China from catching up in the field of cutting-edge semiconductors, and even restricted American companies from purchasing semiconductors from China in the name of so-called "national security".
Fortunately, at present, China's chip industry is becoming more and more aggressive, several of Nvidia's major Chinese customers, that is, China's giants in the field of artificial intelligence and cloud computing, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and Baidu, including companies are transferring orders to local companies such as Huawei.
As a result, Nvidia's losses in China will also be inevitable. In fact, China is the world's largest semiconductor market, and China carries one-fifth of Nvidia's global market revenue, and last year, some American media broke the news that the United States continued to expand its chip restrictions on China, and it was difficult for Nvidia to lose more than $5 billion a year, and these orders came from some of China's leading companies.
It is worth mentioning that an analyst at technology research firm TrendForce pointed out that about 80% of the high-end AI chips of Chinese cloud computing companies currently come from Nvidia, and this proportion may fall to 50%-60% in the next five years. It can be seen that on the one hand, Nvidia did not argue with the White House, and the painful price is indispensable. On the other hand, as an American chip giant, NVIDIA's losses in China are naturally like a weather vane, indicating that the American chip industry is gradually losing the Chinese market. At the same time, this also stimulates the rise of China in the field of artificial intelligence to a certain extent, and American billionaire Elon Musk has declared that China will be one of the leaders in the field of artificial intelligence in the world and has the potential to become the "first place" in this field.
Not only that, as China accelerates its layout in semiconductors, China will usher in another grand scene in the near future, as the Korean media "Chosun Ilbo" previously reported that the South Korean industry believes that more than 50% of the world's traditional chips will be produced in Chinese mainland in the future, and China will further "monopolize the market". It is no wonder that Mike Gallagher, chairman of the "Select Committee on China" of the US House of Representatives, and Raja Krishnamosi, the leader of the Democratic Party from Illinois, recently instigated the Biden administration to take action to prevent the United States from becoming overly dependent on China in mature process chips. It can be seen that the breakthrough of China's chip industry against the trend has become unstoppable, and the United States and its allies are completely self-defeating, and this distorted mentality will only reap the consequences.