Nvidia working on new China-compliant AI chips
The world's biggest chip design firm, Nividia, is working with China-based distributor Inspur on a 'B20' AI chip that will not breach US export restrictions.
Exclusive reporting by Reuters says the B20 will be a cut-down product based on Nvidia's Blackwell chip series, which the firm unveiled in March. Nvidia says the Blackwell platform can help organisations build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor.
Nvidia has been hit hard by the export controls that the US implemented last October. The sanctions effectively barred the sale of many Nvidia data centre products to China, which had been a major market for the firm.
Shortly after the new rules were put in place, Nvidia created scaled-down versions of its H20 chip designs to be compliant and therefore available to Chinese customers. Nvidia is on track to sell over a million of these H20 chips in China this year, which will earn more than USD 12 billion, according to research group SemiAnalysis.
Shipments of the B20 are planned to start in the second quarter of 2025, a separate source told Reuters though there has been no official comment from either Nvidia or Inspur.
