One of many largest tales this week within the HPC-AI world entails — 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 latest months about disruption of chip exports of GPUs to China.
The corporate shrugged off what it mentioned a couple of weeks in the past can be a $5 billion cost and charged forward with revenues ($44.1 billion — together with $39.1 within the knowledge heart market — up from $26 billion a 12 months in the past), and earnings ($18.8 billion, up 26 % YoY).
That the corporate largely exceeded expectations didn’t come as an entire shock contemplating the large and growing demand for AI compute to provide mammoth AI factories being stood up all over the world, together with OpenAI’s AI knowledge heart deliberate for Abilene, TX, which is slated to accommodate as much as 400,000 NVIDIA top-of-the-line Blackwell chips.
Nonetheless, challenges exist for NVIDIA, certainly one of which is the China AI market, which has grow to be more and more walled off to U.S. know-how distributors by the U.S. authorities. In an interview final night time 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 mentioned 50 % of AI builders reside. And he desires them to develop their AI purposes on NVIDIAs CUDA improvement platform to run on NVIDIA {hardware}.
“American know-how stacks will run AI the perfect all around the world, and so that is crucial strategic cause to be in China, as a result of there are such a lot of builders there,” Huang mentioned. “And since the world goes to undertake know-how from one nation or one other, then we desire to be it on the American know-how stack.”
Earlier this 12 months, exports to China of NVIDIA’s pared-down H20 AI GPU, beforehand allowed underneath 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 creating AI chips for the China AI market that adjust to U.S. commerce restrictions.
Based on a narrative in DigiTimes, the 2 firms have “shortly adjusted their designs to decreased specs, and it’s anticipated that beginning in July 2025, they may launch a brand new wave of downgraded, however compliant, AI GPUs that may be bought to China.”
Based on the story, NVIDIA has tentatively named its China AI chip the B20, whereas AMD is shifting forward with the Radeon AI PRO R9700 and different merchandise. “Each can assist the operation of fashions equivalent to DeepSeek,” DigiTimes reported.
NVIDIA’s anticipated B20 adopts the Blackwell structure however with main alterations in reminiscence and computing energy efficiency, in keeping 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 keeping with the publication.
As of 2021, NVIDIA’s market share in China was roughly 90 %, nevertheless it has now dropped to 50 %.
