After successfully lobbying the Trump administration to approve the sale of its H200 chips to China, Nvidia is now thinking of ramping up production of the chips as Chinese companies rush to place orders, Reuters reported, citing anonymous sources.
The most powerful of Nvidia’s previous Hopper generation of graphics processing units (GPUs) made for training large language models, the H200 chips previously could not be sold in China, as the previous Biden administration had proposed rules limiting sales of advanced AI chips in the country. But the Department of Commerce last week gave Nvidia the nod to sell H200 GPUs in China, in exchange for a 25% cut of sales of those chips.
Nvidia is now seeing such strong demand from Chinese companies that it is considering adding more capacity, Reuters reported. However, Chinese officials are still deciding whether to allow the import of the H200 chips, which are said to be significantly more powerful than the H20 GPUs Nvidia had customized to sell in China.
For the chipmaker, expanding production of the H200 GPUs would let it tap latent demand in a country that is racing to develop its own homegrown AI chips. Competition and national security concerns in the West have hampered the availability of the latest and most powerful hardware for training AI models in China, where companies have resorted to focusing on efficiency over sheer scale.
Chinese companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, which are developing their own AI models, have already been in touch with Nvidia to figure out large orders for the H200 chips, which are being produced in limited quantities, the report added.
“We are managing our supply chain to ensure that licensed sales of the H200 to authorized customers in China will have no impact on our ability to supply customers in the United States,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
