“China's computing clusters are changing from being dominated by foreign GPUs to a combination of Chinese GPUs and foreign ones,” Li Xingyu, Enflame's chief ecosystem officer, said during a session on Friday. “There is a problem of lack of demand, much of the computational power in China is still idle.”
“Further reducing barriers to the use of domestic computational power is key to expanding its application in China,” he added.
Collaborating with Shanghai-based chip designer Enflame, AI solutions firm Infinigence — another startup backed by Chinese social media and video gaming giant Tencent — is offering compute resources that can be used by Nvidia and Chinese GPU makers, among others. Uses different types of chips from vendors. “Companies don't need to worry about which GPU they use,” the company said.
Nvidia is not allowed to export its latest chips to China under US export restrictions. Washington has also put major Chinese chip developers on a trade blacklist, making it harder for them to find foundries to produce their designs. Huawei – which claims its Ascend 910B is equivalent to Nvidia's A100 – is among those facing manufacturing disruptions, as it was initially blacklisted in 2019 and has since seen the restrictions tighten. have gone
The area around Huawei's booth was one of the busiest areas on the floor. According to a slide presentation on the site, Huawei Ascend chips are configured for open source major language models including Meta's Llama2. The chips are also used to power half of China's more than 70 flagship models, Huawei previously claimed in a presentation at the Zhongguancun forum in May.
Enflame showcased its Cloudblazer T20 and T21 AI-training chips at the show. One employee said the company's biggest advantage over big rivals such as Huawei, Moore Threads and Biren Technology is that it is not on a US trade blacklist. That means it has access to global foundries like TSMC, which makes about 90 percent of the world's most advanced chips, despite broader restrictions limiting the computational power of its chips.
Nvidia chips designed for Chinese clients to get around US restrictions are also still proving popular.
According to San Francisco-based semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis, Nvidia is expected to ship more than one million H20 GPUs in China this year, generating sales of US$12 billion. “Nvidia's H20 still outperforms Huawei's 910B,” said Dylan Patel, chief analyst at SemiAnalysis.
“China is a large market with strong demand for AI, but the biggest problem is that domestic technology lags behind its global peers and cannot meet domestic demand,” said Robert Cheng, head of Taiwan Research and Research. There won't be enough to do.” Asia Pacific Hardware at BofA Global Research.
“The AI GPUs that China may have are not as strong as the global ones. [alternatives] In terms of performance, and… [the Chinese supply chain] The general is still far behind,” he added.
Mainland China was Nvidia's third-largest market in the fiscal year ended Jan. 28, with sales from China rising 78 percent year-on-year to US$10.3 billion.
Additional reporting by Iris Deng.