As we all know, worried about the rise of China's AI and affecting the interests of the United States, the United States banned Nvidia's H100 and A100 the year before last, and Nvidia launched a castrated version of H800 and A800 for China.
Last year, the United States banned Nvidia's H80, A800 and other chips, and set stricter ban requirements, raising the threshold a lot.
In such a situation, Nvidia complained about the U.S. government and wanted to lobby it to lift the ban, while continuing to castrate the chip to make it meet the ban standards.
According to previous media reports, Nvidia continues to castrate three GPU chips, namely HGX H20 and GPU L20 and L2, which meet the requirements of the ban.
However, everyone also knows that this kind of castration again and again, so that the already low performance of the AI chip, the performance has declined a lot, according to the media, the strongest of themH20, its actual performance compared with the original version of H100, may have castrated 80% of the performance, only 20% of the performance remained.
As a result, many large manufacturers are looking for domestic AI chips that can be replaced.
Among them, Huawei's AI chips are sought after by everyone, especially the Ascend 910B, which is said to have more than 5,000 sets of orders, and from the perspective of actual performance, the Ascend 910B can be benchmarked against the A100, although the actual performance will be slightly worse, but it can be made up for through clusters and other methods.
At the same time, Huawei's Shengteng 910B series AI chips, compared with NVIDIA's AI chips, have more price advantages, and are still domestic brands, so large manufacturers have embraced Huawei and rejected NVIDIA's castrated version of AI chips.
In such a situation, the most direct way is to reduce the price and compete directly with the Ascend 910B, so that it may be able to win back some customers, after all, Nvidia has the advantage of the CUDA ecosystem.
Recently, some media reported that Nvidia has begun to price H20 distributors in China, with the price of each H20 between $12,000 and $15,000, and there are already dealers who have priced it at 110,000 yuan in China.
This price, compared with the previous H100 price, has dropped by two-thirds, because H100 once sold for more than 300,000. At the same time, this price is already about the same as the price of Huawei's AI chips.
Obviously, Nvidia is indeed in a hurry, after all, Nvidia accounted for 90% of the AI chip market in China, and the market size was about $7 billion. If this market is gone, it will have a great impact on Nvidia.
What's more, once the AI chips of Huawei and other manufacturers rise, Nvidia will completely lose China, the largest market, so it has to put down its position and start a price war, wanting to use the price to suppress Huawei's AI chips.
So the next question is, after the price of Nvidia chips, will anyone pay? Before everyone said that Nvidia castrated performance, but if the price is not reduced, it will definitely not be bought, and now that the price has dropped, will it be bought?