Knowing that the US will be difficult, Chinese companies have stored millions of Nvidia’s AI GPUs last year
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by triluzy5
According to reports from Nikkei Asia, Bytedance, Alibaba and Tencent, predicted that the US government would issue a ban on the export of NVIDIA H20 – a version designed specifically for the Chinese market. Over the past year, these three companies have aggressively gathered goods, with an estimated amount of up to about 1 million GPUs – equivalent to nearly a year of supply.
Although they asked NVIDIA to deliver enough H20 before the end of May, the ban on the effect from April has caused a short -term delivery of delivery. If all three companies receive all the desired amounts of goods, the total value of this GPU will exceed $ 12 billion.
The main reason for this large -scale collection is the huge need to calculate in China. For example, Tencent integrates AI Deepseek technology into the Wechat application is said to be a great motivation to promote the needs of GPU to serve AI.
NVIDIA H20 GPU will act as a temporary solution for Chinese companies, while waiting for domestic AI GPUs to reach the same performance. Huawei is now said to be developing the new generation Ascu GPU, announcing it can compete with NVIDIA GB200 – the strongest AI GPU line today, in order to shorten the technological gap with the West.
A GPU AI from NVIDIA
The US ban was issued in April 2025, banning the export of Nvidia H20 HGX GPU to China on the grounds that H20’s memory bandwidth and connection are strong enough to use in supercomputers, potentially at risk of national security. This decision caused NVIDIA to damage about US $ 5.5 billion due to the inability to consume the H20 inventory in China.
In essence, the H20 is the shortened version of H100 – the previous generation of the latest B200 HGX series. Like the RTX 5090D and RTX 4090D, the H20 is refined to comply with the US sanctions, with AI and HPC performance significantly lower than the original version.
In the context of increasingly strict restrictive commands, China is trying to find ways to enhance autonomy in the field of AI chip, and actively store GPUs that can also be imported from the West, before the ban makes the supply completely scarce.
