One of many largest tales this week within the HPC-AI world entails — shock! — NVIDIA. Truly, make that two or three of the most important tales. One is NVIDIA’s stellar quarterly earnings announcement within the face of considerations 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 could be a $5 billion cost and charged forward with revenues ($44.1 billion — together with $39.1 within the information middle market — up from $26 billion a 12 months in the past), and earnings ($18.8 billion, up 26 p.c YoY).
That the corporate principally exceeded expectations didn’t come as a whole shock contemplating the large and growing demand for AI compute to produce mammoth AI factories being stood up around the globe, together with OpenAI’s AI information middle 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 every of which is the China AI market, which has turn out to be more and more walled off to U.S. know-how 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 p.c of AI builders reside. And he needs them to develop their AI purposes on NVIDIAs CUDA growth platform to run on NVIDIA {hardware}.
“American know-how stacks will run AI the most effective everywhere in the world, and so that is a very powerful strategic cause 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 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, have 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 story in DigiTimes, the 2 corporations have “rapidly 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 offered 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 accordance 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 accordance with the publication.
As of 2021, NVIDIA’s market share in China was roughly 90 p.c, but it surely has now dropped to 50 p.c.
