Tech businesses in China race to replace Nvidia components as U.S. escalates export restrictions
Tech Giant Shift: Chinese Companies Ditch Nvidia for AI Chips Amidst Export Controls
In the face of stricter export controls imposed by the Trump administration, Chinese tech titans such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu are looking beyond Nvidia for alternatives as the sale of H20 chips, specially designed for their AI needs, has been prohibited.
According to reports from the Financial Times, these companies have already commenced testing homegrown alternatives to Nvidia's AI chips, like Huawei's Ascend 920 AI chip. Industry experts speculate that the lack of clarity on how H20's successor, the B20, and its AMD competitor, the Radeon AI PRO R9700, will perform, is prompting tech honchos to cast an eye towards domestic options.
With their stockpiled Nvidia AI chips expected to sustain AI development until early 2026, Chinese companies are already seeing the writing on the wall. China-made semiconductors were once deemed about a decade or two behind U.S. technology. However, today, some Chinese tech companies, such as Lisuan with their G100 GPU, are one generation behind their U.S. counterparts.
China's AI technology has made notable advancements, primarily due to strict export controls on American-made chips. As Jensen Huang forecasted, such measures have only accelerated China's quest for semiconductor independence. While Chinese officials conceded the harsh implications of the export controls, they've also spurred local chip makers to innovate and find solutions, while a thriving black market continues to supply Nvidia chips.
The migration from Nvidia hardware to alternative AI chips poses a significant hurdle, with substantial costs involved and a potential three-month disruption period. However, this upheaval is temporary, and subsequent deployments will be made easier once the transition has been completed. The long-term goal here is to minimize reliance on American-made AI chips and build China's own comparable semiconductors.
Should China succeed in reducing reliance on American AI chips and develop its own competitive alternatives, Nvidia's global dominance in AI technology could face a major challenge in the foreseeable future. Stick with Tom's Hardware for the latest updates on this evolving story.
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### Insights:
a. Huawei's Ascend 910C, an AI processor combining two 910B chips, delivers up to 60% of the performance of Nvidia's H100 for inference tasks.b. Huawei is promoting its Supernode 384 architecture as a competitor to Nvidia's systems.c. Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu are also evaluating other domestic semiconductors for AI workloads.d. Baidu's AI cloud is exploring diversified chip solutions, while Tencent is attempting to optimize existing high-end chips and considering alternatives.e. China has launched mass production of the world's first non-binary AI chip, which merges binary and stochastic logic for fault tolerance and power efficiency, but it is not being tested by these tech giants.f. Transitioning from Nvidia's CUDA software stack to Huawei's CANN is proving to be a significant challenge, with some companies anticipating a three-month disruption period.g. Nvidia is developing a lower-cost AI chip for China, but it may lack high bandwidth memory and NVLink, which could impact its competitiveness against local alternatives.
- As the Chinese tech industry shifts focus, finance is being allocated towards testing domestic alternatives like Huawei's Ascend 910C, aiming to compete with Nvidia's AI chips in terms of performance.
- In the realm of data-and-cloud-computing, companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu are investigating various homegrown semiconductors for AI workloads, seeking to eventually reduce their reliance on American-made technology and bolster China's domestic technology prowess.
