Can China’s Indigenous AI Chips Compete with NVIDIA?

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In its FY2Q24 earnings report for 2023, NVIDIA disclosed that the U.S. government had imposed controls on its AI chips destined for the Middle East. However, on August 31, 2023, the U.S. Department of Commerce stated that they had “not prohibited the sale of chips to the Middle East” and declined to comment on whether new requirements had been imposed on specific U.S. companies. Both NVIDIA and AMD have not responded to this issue.

TrendForce’s analysis:

• Close ties between Middle Eastern countries and China raise U.S. concerns:

In NVIDIA’s FY2Q24 earnings report, it mentioned, “During the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, the USG informed us of an additional licensing requirement for a subset of A100 and H100 products destined to certain customers and other regions, including some countries in the Middle East.” It is speculated that the U.S. is trying to prevent high-speed AI chips from flowing into the Chinese market via the Middle East. This has led to controls on the export of AI chips to the Middle East.

Since August 2022, the U.S. has imposed controls on NVIDIA A100, H100, AMD MI100, MI200, and other AI-related GPUs, restricting the export of AI chips with bidirectional transfer rates exceeding 600GB/s to China. Saudi Arabia had already signed a strategic partnership with China in 2022 for cooperation in the digital economy sector, including AI, advanced computing, and quantum computing technologies. Additionally, the United Arab Emirates has expressed interest in AI cooperation with China. There have been recent reports of Saudi Arabia heavily acquiring NVIDIA’s AI chips, which has raised concerns in the U.S.

• Huawei is expected to release AI chips comparable to NVIDIA A100 in the second half of 2024; competition is yet to be observed:

Affected by U.S. sanctions, Chinese companies are vigorously developing AI chips. iFlytek is planning to launch a new general-purpose LLM (Large Language Model) in October 2023, and the AI chip Ascend 910B, co-developed with Huawei, is expected to hit the market in the second half of 2024, with performance claimed to rival that of NVIDIA A100. In fact, Huawei had already introduced the Ascend 910, which matched the performance of NVIDIA’s V100, in 2019. Considering Huawei’s Kirin 9000s, featured in the flagship smartphone Mate 60 Pro released in August 2023, it is highly likely that Huawei can produce products with performance comparable to A100.

However, it’s important to note that the A100 was already announced by NVIDIA in 2020. This means that even if Huawei successfully launches a new AI chip, it will already be four years behind NVIDIA. Given the expected 7nm process for Huawei’s Ascend 910B and NVIDIA’s plan to release the 3nm process-based Blackwell architecture GPU B100 in the second half of 2024, Huawei will also lag behind by two generations in chip fabrication technology. With the parameters of LLM doubling annually, the competitiveness of Huawei’s new AI chip remains to be observed.

• China remains NVIDIA’s dominion in the short term:

Despite the active development of AI chips by Chinese IC design house, NVIDIA’s AI chips remain the preferred choice for training LLM models among Chinese cloud companies. Looking at the revenue performance of the leading Chinese AI chip company, Cambricon, its revenue for the first half of 2023 was only CNY 114 million, a YoY decrease of 34%. While being added to the U.S. Entity List was a major reason for the revenue decline, NVIDIA’s dominance in the vast Chinese AI market is also a contributing factor. It is estimated that NVIDIA’s market share in the Chinese GPU market for AI training exceeded 95% in the first half of 2023. In fact, in the second quarter of 2023, the China market accounted for 20-25% of NVIDIA’s Data Center segment revenue.

The main reason for this is that the Chinese AI ecosystem is still quite fragmented and challenging to compete with NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem. Therefore, Chinese companies are actively engaged in software development. However, building a sufficiently attractive ecosystem to lure Chinese CSPs in the short term remains quite challenging. Consequently, it is expected that NVIDIA will continue to dominate the Chinese market for the next 2-3 years.

(Photo credit: NVIDIA)