The Chinese market is cold, and it is rumored that Nvidia has lowered the price of H20 chips

Xinzhixun

2024-05-25 12:57Posted on the official account of Guangdong Xinzhixun

On May 24, according to Reuters, due to the poor demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips H20 series for the Chinese market, Nvidia has lowered the price of H20 series chips.

Three supply chain sources said that Chinese server dealers are selling H20 chips at a price of about 100,000 yuan per set, and servers equipped with eight sets of chips are priced at about 1.1 million yuan to 1.3 million yuan each. In some cases, the Nvidia H20 chip is already selling for more than 10% less than the Huawei Ascend 910B.

At the beginning of February this year, when the Nvidia H20 was pre-ordered in China, the channel pricing was set at between $12,000~$15,000, but some channel providers quoted as high as about 110,000 yuan (equivalent to $15,320). In comparison, the Huawei Ascend 910B is priced at around 120,000 yuan.

It should be pointed out that Nvidia H20 is a "castration" product launched by Nvidia for the Chinese market under the influence of US export controls. According to the product specifications, the H20 is a castrated version based on the NVIDIA H100 GPU, with 96 GB of internal memory, running speed of up to 4.0 Tb/s, and computing power of 296 TFLOPs, using the GH100 chip, the performance density (TFLOPs/Die size) is only 2.9. In comparison, the H100 has 80GB of HBM3 memory, 3.4Tb/s of internal memory bandwidth, 1,979 TFLOPs of computing power, and a performance density of up to 19.4. In other words, the AI computing power of the "castrated version" of the H20 chip is less than 15% of that of the H100. Some of the performance is not even as good as the Ascend 910B. Obviously, this performance does not meet the needs of Chinese AI manufacturers.

In the past six months, only five buyers or affiliated buyers have expressed interest in purchasing H20 chips, compared to more than a dozen buyers of Ascend 910B chips in the same period, according to the report. According to sources, some Chinese tech giants have already placed orders, and Alibaba has ordered more than 30,000 H20 chips. However, Ali did not publicly respond to the news, so it is impossible to confirm whether the news is true.

At present, the price of a single card for H20 servers sold by server dealers in China is about 100,000 yuan, and the price of a single card for eight-card servers is 1.1 million yuan to 1.3 million yuan. In February this year, channel providers began to sell servers with 8 H20 GPUs assembled in advance, and the price was 1.4 million yuan. In comparison, the Ascend 910B sold by distributors costs more than $120,000 per card, while the price of a single card on an eight-card server ranges from $1.3 million to $1.5 million.

It should be noted that the Ascend 910B only started to enter the AI market last year, and the supply is relatively limited. Some market participants pointed out that Huawei will significantly increase shipments of its Ascend 910B chip this year, and the chip has outperformed H20 in some key indicators. This also means that Nvidia H20 will face greater competitive pressure in the Chinese market this year.

Dylan Patel, founder of research institute SemiAnalysis, said that nearly 1 million H20 chips will be shipped to China in the second half of 2024, and Nvidia must compete with Huawei in terms of price to be able to get enough orders in the Chinese market to digest so many chips. Due to the larger memory capacity, the H20 is more expensive to produce than the H100. However, the H20 is only half the price of the H100.

Editor: Xinzhixun-Rogue Sword

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