SCMP "Not a Ban on H2O... Prioritizing Chinese Products"
Chinese authorities have unofficially advised domestic companies to use Chinese-made chips instead of American company Nvidia's artificial intelligence (AI) chips, South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on the 7th.
SCMP, citing multiple sources, stated that while there is no official ban on Nvidia's China-customized H20 graphics processing unit (GPU), Chinese companies have been notified to prioritize products developed by companies such as Huawei.
However, according to another source, as of August, orders for Nvidia H20 chips by Chinese companies have not been restricted.
Earlier, The Information and Bloomberg also reported that Chinese authorities requested domestic companies to increase purchases from Chinese suppliers instead of Nvidia.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the main Chinese government body overseeing semiconductors and AI, has not issued an official statement on this matter. SCMP reported that neither MIIT nor Nvidia responded to inquiries regarding this issue.
In response to U.S. advanced semiconductor sanctions against China, Nvidia released lower-spec H20 chips for the Chinese market. Despite the downgraded specifications due to sanctions, the H20 remains popular among Chinese users. Nvidia is expected to supply over one million H20 GPUs in China this year, generating sales of approximately $12 billion (about 16.164 trillion KRW). Despite U.S. Department of Commerce sanctions, Nvidia announced in January that China is its third-largest market.
However, adoption of Chinese-made alternative AI chips is also on the rise. For example, China Telecom, a state-owned Chinese telecommunications company, announced on the 28th of last month that it developed two large-scale language models, which are the foundational technologies for generative AI applications like ChatGPT, and these were trained using Chinese-made AI chips. Although the Chinese supplier was not disclosed, China Telecom has previously collaborated with Huawei.
SCMP reported last month that Huawei began providing samples of its new semiconductor 'Ascend 910C' (Chinese name: Shengteng 910C) to major Chinese server companies for hardware testing and configuration.
© The Asia Business Daily(www.asiae.co.kr). All rights reserved.
