Huawei's AI chips have been snapped up, and Nvidia's 'China-specific AI chips' have been delayed?

Data shows that the scale of artificial intelligence chips in the Chinese market in 2022 will reach US$7 billion. Nvidia basically monopolizes 90% of this US$7 billion market.

Although NVIDIA's top chips such as H100 and A100 cannot be sold to China, NVIDIA has launched castrated versions such as H800 and A800 to replace H100 and A100.

In October this year, the United States upgraded its ban, and chips such as H800 and A800 can no longer be sold to mainland China.

So Nvidia plans to launch another "China-specific AI chip". The initial plan is to have three models, namely H20, L20 and L2. These three models are based on the H100 and have been castrated so that their performance meets the requirements of the ban.

According to media reports, the most powerful chip is H20, but compared with H100, its performance is blocked by 80%, only about 20% of the performance of H100.

For NVIDIA, China’s market, which is larger than US$7 billion, must not be lost. It must launch AI chips to seize it, and cannot let its opponents take away the market.

However, news recently came out that Nvidia’s three special edition chips have been delayed.

Only L20 may be launched as scheduled, H20 and L2 may be postponed, especially H20, the most powerful chip, it is unknown when and whether it will be launched.

Why is this happening? The most important reason is that the Chinese market has changed and is not as good as Nvidia imagined.

Because Huawei’s AI chips have been favored by many customers, although there are still many lessons to be learned about ecology, performance, etc., “almost all first- and second-tier Internet manufacturers have increased their investment in domestic alternatives such as Huawei AI chips. Procurement

In fact, during this period, we often see some major manufacturers saying that they have purchased Huawei’s AI chips. This shows that the Chinese market has undergone some changes.

NVIDIA's AI chip that has 80% of its performance may not be able to impress this customer. You must know that according to some industry insiders, the test performance of Huawei Ascend 910B compared to NVIDIA A100 when using some open source models is about the latter. 0.8-1.2 times.

So under the current situation, Nvidia needs to wait and see the situation for a while before deciding whether to launch this special version of the chip.

In addition, Nvidia may also adjust the chip. After all, if there is no advantage in performance and price, this special version of the chip will not be able to attract customers.

However, this will also bring about another problem, that is, Huawei's wafer production capacity is currently very tight. The Kirin 9000S process is the same as that of AI chips. If AI chips are shipped in large quantities, then the shipments of mobile phone SoC chips will definitely decrease. , because this will crowd out wafer production capacity and have a big impact on Huawei's mobile phone business. Then the supply of mate60 will continue to be tight and even affect other models. What should we do?

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