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After a few years, Huang visited Chinese mainland again.
A few days ago, videos and photos of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dancing on stage wearing a large-flower vest with Northeast characteristics were leaked on social media.
It is reported that Huang Jenxun came to China this time to visit NVIDIA's three offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, and attended the annual meeting in China.
2023 can be called a "dream year" for Nvidia, in one year, the company's stock price soared 234%, the market value of more than $1.4 trillion, and the annual revenue is expected to reach a record $58.8 billion in revenue, surpassing Intel and Samsung Electronics to become the world's first semiconductor company.
And is Huang's low-key arrival in Chinese mainland to celebrate the excellent results achieved in 2023 with domestic employees?
After many years, Huang Jenxun returned to Chinese mainland
The last time Huang visited China publicly, he had to rewind the time to December 18, 2019. At that time, at the GTC conference held at the Suzhou Jinji Lake International Conference Center, Huang gave a keynote speech in English for about 2 hours, sharing NVIDIA's plans and innovations in computer graphics, AI artificial intelligence, HPC high-performance computing and other fields in 2019, which is also his most powerful trip in Chinese mainland in recent years.
For many years after that, Huang never visited Chinese mainland again, but he traveled frequently to other Asian markets.
Throughout 2023, in order to consolidate NVIDIA's leadership position in the AI processor market, Huang made frequent appearances in Asia, traveled to many places, met with politicians, entrepreneurs and scientists, and laid out a wide range of AI-related cooperation, including three appearances in Taiwan, China, in May, October and November.
Among them, Huang arranged a number of trips during his visit to Taiwan in late May, including attending Computex Taipei, visiting MediaTek to announce joint development of automotive SoC chips, meeting and having dinner with Chang and his wife, and meeting with Hon Hai Group Chairman Liu Yangwei.
During Huang's visit to Taiwan in October, although he did not make his itinerary public, he said that the purpose of strengthening the supply chain was significant. On October 18, he was revealed to appear at Hon Hai Technology Day, announcing that the two sides would jointly build an AI factory.
In addition, on November 9, when Zhang Zhongmou was awarded the "First Li Guoding Award" in Taiwan, China, Huang Jenxun and his wife made a special trip to Taiwan to participate. He said that without Zhang Zhongmou, there would be no NVIDIA, and without the TSMC he founded, there would be no NVIDIA's current achievements. It is worth mentioning that a number of Taiwanese dignitaries and technology company executives attended the award ceremony.
It can be seen that with the rapid development of NVIDIA in 2023, Huang Jenxun also seems to be extremely busy, but he has not come to Chinese mainland after visiting Taiwan many times, which also makes him low-key to Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen three offices at this point in time, which has aroused great interest.
We see that the United States just announced a few months ago that the export ban on chip products to China has been expanded again, and Nvidia's latest generation of professional graphics cards and top gaming graphics cards are on the ban list.
The market feedback of this series of "China-specific" chips will also indicate whether NVIDIA can consolidate its leading position in the Chinese market.
But as the new "China special" GPUs hit the ground running cold in the Chinese market, Huang's purpose for coming to Chinese mainland for the first time in many years became much clearer.
Users don't buy the "China Special Supply".
In the past two years, the U.S. government has successively announced bans on NVIDIA's high-end AI chips, including A100, A800, H100, H800, L40S and other products in the scope of export control.
As a shrewd businessman who travels between China and the West, "Lao Huang" naturally understands the eternal truth of "there is a policy and a countermeasure".
Nvidia immediately adjusted its ace product H100 and launched customized chips HGXH20, L20PCIe and L2PCIe for the Chinese market that meet U.S. regulations. Among them, HGXH20 is suitable for high-density servers and deep learning training. L20PCIe and L2PCIe are suitable for workstations and desktops to meet the AI computing needs of ordinary users.
However, it is worth noting that under many restrictions, the overall computing power of the special version of the chip is only about 20% of that of H100.
Originally, NVIDIA's idea was to use the company's signature and exclusive products to stabilize large customers in the Chinese market with special chips, and then wait and see whether the U.S. policy will be loosened. However, the market performance in the past three months has proved that in the context of autonomy and control, Chinese buyers are not willing to take risks to pay for Nvidia's low-end chips.
According to reports, large Chinese technology companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance have indicated to Nvidia that the number of chips ordered from them this year will be far less than the number of Nvidia high-performance chips originally planned to be purchased.
On the one hand, the latest version of the chip provided by Nvidia to Chinese companies is downgraded again on the basis of the previous performance downgrade, and the performance has been greatly weakened. In this case, it is difficult for Nvidia's chips to open a large gap with domestic chips.
On the other hand, even if NVIDIA chips are used, there is still a risk of "supply interruption" in the future, while domestic chips are obviously much "safer". At present, some Chinese companies are adjusting their chip supply sources to make them more diversified.
The cold reception suffered by Nvidia's chips in the Chinese market is most directly reflected in its revenue. Compared to fiscal 2022, NVIDIA's revenue in China in fiscal 2023 decreased by 18.4% year-on-year.
Moreover, some analysts pointed out that if the United States continues to implement the current policy toughly, the share of some of Nvidia's products may fall by as much as 30% in the next five years.
For Nvidia, the task of meeting the requirements of U.S. regulators while supplying the chips needed by Chinese customers is becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish.
So, from this perspective, choosing this time to come to China reflects Huang's concern about the potential loss of the Chinese market. And, with the development of local companies such as Huawei in the field of chips, Huang's concerns have a better chance of becoming a reality.
Huawei is fierce, and Lao Huang has to guard against it
It is said that at the annual meeting, Lao Huang deliberately dragged a suitcase and distributed cash red envelopes to employees in the form of a lottery. There was also a small episode at the lottery site, and the name of one of the lucky winners was "Huawei". While this is just a small episode, local manufacturers such as Huawei are starting to eat into Nvidia's market share in China.
Two months ago, Baidu was rumored to have ordered 1,600 Huawei Ascend 910B AI chips for its 200 servers to replace Nvidia chips. The total value of the order is about 450 million yuan, or about 61.83 million US dollars. Although the size of this order is relatively small, the meaning behind it is extraordinary. This suggests that some domestic tech companies in China may gradually abandon Nvidia and switch to domestic chips, the sources said.
An analyst said: "In terms of the current development of domestic AI chips, although there is a certain gap with the international leading level, there are already some excellent AI chip companies in China, such as Huawei, Pingtou Semiconductor, etc." Through independent research and development and technological innovation, these enterprises have achieved certain results. At the same time, there are also some AI chip start-ups in China, which are growing rapidly. Therefore, from the perspective of technical reserves and capacity support, the development of domestic AI chips has a certain foundation. ”
In fact, companies related to the AI industry chain, including Huawei, Cambrian, Pingtou Semiconductor, and Moore Threads, have shown their own AI chips or new progress. Jiang Tao, secretary of the board of directors and vice president of iFLYTEK, previously said that Huawei's Ascend 910B capabilities have basically been benchmarked against the NVIDIA A100. It is reported that the shipment of Ascend 910B this year is more than 400,000 units, and the price is still rising.
Huawei's founder Ren Zhengfei also said in an interview: "Huawei's AI cluster has supported 16,000 boards, and a super node cluster in the future can manage hundreds of thousands of boards, support ultra-high-speed interconnection, ultra-efficient liquid cooling and heat dissipation, instantaneous burst power supply, and achieve high system availability, which is not weaker than the United States." ”
Behind this shift is China's strategy to promote the development of the domestic semiconductor industry. In order to reduce the dependence on imported chips, we have increased support for local semiconductor companies and encouraged them to accelerate the pace of independent research and development and improve their technical level.
Although there is still a certain gap between China's semiconductor industry and the world's top companies in terms of technology, this gap is rapidly narrowing with the naked eye.
Write at the end
"We have to run very fast ourselves, and the amount of resources that China is currently pouring into chips is so huge that we can't underestimate it," Huang said. It seems that he has anticipated Nvidia's predicament in the Chinese market, and his response is by no means to launch a "castrated" GPU and dance in China.
Metaverse New Voice believes that Nvidia is most afraid of "uncertainty", but as long as the United States suppresses China, "uncertainty" will always exist. In the long run, it will make the world lose trust in the supply chain of the United States, not only Chinese companies, but also companies in other countries will be discouraged from American companies, so as to find more stable suppliers.