CNBC AI News – In a move closely watched by the tech world, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced during a recent trip to China that the H20 series of AI chips has secured U.S. approval and will be reintroduced to the Chinese market.
Following the announcement, Morgan Stanley issued a report highlighting NVIDIA’s plan to resume H20 chip sales in China. The report further revealed the development of a new AI chip, the RTX Pro GPU, specifically designed for the Chinese market and fully compliant with U.S. export regulations.
Morgan Stanley views this development as a “positive catalyst” for China’s tech giants, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT). The investment bank anticipates increased capital expenditure from Alibaba and Tencent in the second half of the year, following a period of relatively lower spending in the first quarter.
Morgan Stanley detailed potential applications of NVIDIA’s GPUs within the BAT ecosystem. Tencent is expected to leverage the increased computing power for AI applications, ad-tech upgrades, and cloud services. Alibaba’s focus will likely be on bolstering its cloud offerings, transforming its core e-commerce operations with AI, and advancing applications like Tongyi and Quark. Baidu’s priorities include migrating its core search engine to generative AI, enhancing its cloud services, and furthering its autonomous driving initiatives.
Reports previously surfaced indicating a scramble among Chinese firms, including internet heavyweights Tencent and ByteDance, to place orders for the H20 chips. NVIDIA is now navigating the process of submitting these orders to the U.S. government for approval. ByteDance and Tencent are reportedly already undergoing the application process.
But who stands to lose the most from the resurgence of NVIDIA in the Chinese market? Potentially, Huawei.
David Sacks, closely associated with White House AI and cryptocurrency policy, suggested that allowing NVIDIA to sell chips in China again, even “degraded, less powerful” versions, could serve as a crucial check on Huawei. Sacks argued that preventing Huawei from dominating the massive Chinese market would limit its ability to scale and ultimately compete with the U.S. on a global stage.
Huawei has experienced significant growth in the past year, notably launching CloudMatrix, a technology enabling the networking of up to 384 Ascend chips to work in unison. While Huawei’s single-chip performance may lag behind NVIDIA’s, the ability to connect a vast number of chips allows Huawei to achieve comparable results through sheer computational power.
The underlying concern is that ceding the entire Chinese market to Huawei would incentivize Chinese companies, initially targeted for H20 chips, to adopt Huawei’s chips instead, ultimately fueling Huawei’s expansion.
Original article, Author: Tobias. If you wish to reprint this article, please indicate the source:https://aicnbc.com/4939.html
