It is said that Nvidia is thinking of hiving off its China operation to become a separate unit operating as a domestic Chinese company.
This would allow the unit to compete with domestic Chins chip suppliers without being affected by US trade destruction
Nvidia’s CEO is reported to have expressed concerns that domestic China chips will be used to build a string of China government funded datacentres across the Digital Silk Road territories.
Foreign made chips , wouldn’t get a look-in under current circumstances.
Driving Nvidia’s concern is that China is catching up in AI chips. In May, Huawei is intending to sample its Ascend 910D AI processor which competes with Nvidia’s 2022-vintage Hopper processor H100.
It is said that the 910D can be competitive for AI inference tasks with the H100, but does not match the H100 for AI training workloads.
Nonetheless, at the rack-scale, Huawei’s predecessor chip – the 910C – out-performs Nvidia for performance, though not efficiency, and the 910D is said to be focussed on efficiency.
With China-built AI datacentres competitive in performance with the West’s datacentres, China can develop AI as fast as the West without the West’s chips and this is pushing Nvidia towards hiving off its China operation so it can compete for China datacentre slots.
If Nvidia’s China the gambit succeeds without any penalty, who knows what a flood of similar moves will follow driving a coach and horses through the US restrictions?
