Used Goods Sweep Spreads to Korea as Chaos Erupts Over Items Unavailable Even at 7 Million Won in China

Open-Source AI "Boomerang" Triggered by DeepSeek
Surging Popularity of Inference GPUs for DeepSeek R1
Strong Demand for H20 GPU with Samsung Electronics HBM
Korean Secondhand Market Scrambles for Personal RTX 4090 as Prices Soar

On the 27th, on major domestic PC component second-hand trading platforms such as QuasarZone, Junggonara, and Danggeun, posts about buying or selling the NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU are continuously being uploaded. The market price of the 4090 has also surged significantly. It is presumed that those trading GPUs in large quantities are leading the purchases. Buyers are mainly active in Seoul and the metropolitan area, sending purchase inquiry text messages as soon as posts selling the 4090 appear.

NVIDIA's RTX 4090 Founders Edition GPU. Although this model was discontinued this year, demand surged sharply in China following the emergence of DeepSeek, causing prices to skyrocket. Photo by NVIDIA

This GPU is being traded at around 3.5 million KRW. Compared to mid-last month when the price was formed in the high 2 million KRW range, the transaction price has soared by nearly 30%. One seller said, "As soon as I posted the sale, about 20 text inquiries came in," expressing astonishment.

Some say that the price of the 4090, which was discontinued earlier this year, surged because the new 5090 GPU became hard to obtain due to a sold-out situation, but in reality, the main cause is the price explosion of the 4090 in China. It is analyzed that the demand for the 4090 GPU has skyrocketed as more people in China try to install and utilize the AI called DeepSeek on personal PCs or servers.

The China Financial Daily reported, citing local industry insiders, that the price of one 4090 GPU in China has soared to an all-time high of 35,000 yuan (about 7 million KRW).

Industry insiders estimate that due to the rapid price increase and difficulty in obtaining the GPUs, Chinese parties are securing large quantities of 4090s from Korea via Hong Kong or Singapore.

This phenomenon also occurred in 2023. The price of the 4090 surged about threefold immediately after the U.S. government banned sales in China to curb China's AI development. Subsequently, the 4090D model with reduced performance was sold in China instead of the 4090. It is known that China has also unlocked the performance restrictions set by NVIDIA on the 4090D and is utilizing it.

◆Why the GPU H20 for China turned from an ugly duckling into a swan = NVIDIA sells the H20, a data center GPU with reduced performance compared to the H100 and H200, in China due to U.S. government regulations. The situation is similar here. Reuters recently estimated that the soaring sales of the H20 in China will boost NVIDIA's earnings.

According to Chinese media, the H20 initially had poor sales due to perceptions of high price and low performance. An official who spoke with the Financial Daily said, "For a year, no customers showed interest in the H20, but the situation has completely changed." Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, and others are also actively securing the H20. The official said that the market price of H20 servers, which had fallen from 1.4 million yuan to 1 million yuan, is also rising. Supply is tight, requiring about a four-week waiting period.

The revival of the H20 is also due to DeepSeek. DeepSeek R1 is open-source software that anyone can download and use on their computer. The fact that DeepSeek R1 can be fully utilized using affordable H20, especially the personal-use 4090, without placing expensive servers in data centers, is driving demand.

While the H20's performance may be insufficient for AI training, it is adequate for supporting R1's inference. Inference includes the process AI goes through before answering. It has spread within China that if multiple H20s or 4090s are used together, the largest model of DeepSeek R1, the 671B model, can be used.

It was known that eight H20s were needed to utilize DeepSeek R1, but researchers at Tsinghua University announced that a single 4090 GPU can run the top 671B model of DeepSeek R1, attracting attention.

NVIDIA's use of 96 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory (HBM3) in the H20 has emerged as an advantage. To load large-scale large language models (LLMs) onto GPUs, the GPU must have larger memory. In this regard, the H20 with 96GB is superior to the A100 or H100, which have 80GB memory. U.S. regulations ironically provided China with better GPUs for inference. The popularity of the personal-use 4090 GPU is also due to its 24GB memory capacity. The earlier forecast that NVIDIA would stop supplying the H20 due to lack of demand at the end of last year is now disappearing. Samsung Electronics, known to supply the HBM3 used in the H20, may also benefit.

Market research firm IDC forecasts that China's AI server purchase scale will grow from $19 billion last year to $25.9 billion this year and reach $55.2 billion by 2028. A significant portion of this is expected to be invested in inference servers.

Chinese insiders believe that although the performance of Chinese-made GPUs produced by companies like Huawei has improved significantly, demand for existing GPUs in China will continue.

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, emphasized in a conference call after the earnings announcement on the 26th (local time) that "AI is advancing at the speed of light," highlighting the tremendous demand for GPUs, especially the latest Blackwell.