One of many greatest tales this week within the HPC-AI world includes — shock! — NVIDIA. Truly, make that two or three of the largest tales. One is NVIDIA’s stellar quarterly earnings announcement within the face of issues in current months about disruption of chip exports of GPUs to China.
The corporate shrugged off what it stated just a few weeks in the past can be a $5 billion cost and charged forward with revenues ($44.1 billion — together with $39.1 within the information heart market — up from $26 billion a yr in the past), and earnings ($18.8 billion, up 26 % YoY).
That the corporate largely exceeded expectations didn’t come as a whole shock contemplating the big and growing demand for AI compute to provide mammoth AI factories being stood up world wide, together with OpenAI’s AI information heart deliberate for Abilene, TX, which is slated to deal with as much as 400,000 NVIDIA top-of-the-line Blackwell chips.
Nonetheless, challenges exist for NVIDIA, one in all which is the China AI market, which has develop into more and more walled off to U.S. expertise distributors by the U.S. authorities. In an interview final evening with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made the case for continued gross sales of his firm’s GPUs to China, the place he stated 50 % of AI builders reside. And he needs them to develop their AI purposes on NVIDIAs CUDA growth platform to run on NVIDIA {hardware}.
“American expertise stacks will run AI the very best everywhere in the world, and so that is a very powerful strategic motive to be in China, as a result of there are such a lot of builders there,” Huang stated. “And since the world goes to undertake expertise from one nation or one other, then we want to be it on the American expertise stack.”
Earlier this yr, exports to China of NVIDIA’s pared-down H20 AI GPU, beforehand allowed beneath U.S. commerce guidelines, had been closed to exports by the Trump White Home, forcing NVIDIA to take the $5 billion cost. This raises one other main story rising this week, that NVIDIA and AMD are engaged on growing AI chips for the China AI market that adjust to U.S. commerce restrictions.
In keeping with a narrative in DigiTimes, the 2 firms have “rapidly adjusted their designs to decreased specs, and it’s anticipated that beginning in July 2025, they’ll launch a brand new wave of downgraded, however compliant, AI GPUs that may be offered to China.”
In keeping with the story, NVIDIA has tentatively named its China AI chip the B20, whereas AMD is transferring forward with the Radeon AI PRO R9700 and different merchandise. “Each can help the operation of fashions comparable to DeepSeek,” DigiTimes reported.
NVIDIA’s anticipated B20 adopts the Blackwell structure however with main alterations in reminiscence and computing energy efficiency, in line with DigiTimes. AMD’s Radeon AI PRO R9700 and different merchandise are designed for AI workstations to speed up native inference, mannequin fine-tuning and different data-intensive workflows, in line with the publication.
As of 2021, NVIDIA’s market share in China was roughly 90 %, nevertheless it has now dropped to 50 %.
