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Nvidia, the computing hardware designer and one of the world's most valuable companies, is reportedly developing AI chips specifically designed for the Chinese market to comply with U.S. export controls.
The move comes as the company seeks to navigate restrictions on exporting high-powered AI chips to China while maintaining its presence in a crucial market.
Chipmakers are barred from exporting high-powered chips designed to handle AI workloads to China over national security fears.
Nvidia is reportedly working with local distributor Inspur to develop a version of its upcoming Blackwell chips designed for the Chinese market.
The B20 will reportedly start shipping in the second quarter of 2025.
Nvidia has not publicly commented on the report, but investors responded positively. The company’s already high stock price rose by 1.4% in U.S. premarket trading earlier this week.
The chips would need to have processing speeds that are slower than the Blackwell GPUs. U.S. export rules bar deliveries of chips with high chip-to-chip transfer speeds. When combined, clusters of chips can run inference and training workloads for large language and foundation models.
The new B200 chips offer a 30x performance increase compared with the prior H100 line for running AI model inference.
Nvidia previously developed the A800 and H800, slower versions of its A100 and H100 chips GPUs, to comply with initial rules. Nvidia’s H800 line operated around half the peak chip-to-chip speed of the H100.
But as the Biden administration tightened the export rules, these slower chips were subsequently banned.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang previously said the Biden administration’s rules left the company with “hands tied behind our back” and that the restrictions could harm American chipmakers.
Ahead of the anticipated ban, Chinese customers were stockpiling these chips as export rules made access to top-level hardware scarce. Previous reports suggest some Chinese companies sought alternative strategies to get around the sanctions, including appropriating Nvidia gaming chips to continue AI development.
China formed a lucrative part of Nvidia’s business. The country accounts for 17% of the company’s turnover, compared to 26% before the export rules came into force.
An attempt to recapture lost segments of the Chinese market would further boost a company already riding a wave. The GPU maker recently hit a $3.34 trillion market cap, making it the world’s most valuable company ahead of Microsoft.
The export restriction hasn’t phased some Chinese AI leaders.
At the recent World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Huawei Cloud’s CEO said Chinese AI developers should focus on improving computing architectures rather than obsessing over access to powerful AI hardware.
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