NVIDIA's China-Exclusive Chip H20 Faces Another Ban by the US Government

2024-07-23

Recently, NVIDIA's China-exclusive chip H20 is facing the risk of being banned by the US government, which has attracted widespread attention. This chip is a product tailored by NVIDIA for the Chinese market to meet specific needs. However, with the strict export restrictions on high-end chips by the US government, the future of H20 has become uncertain.

Background of the H20 Chip

H20 is the most powerful among the three "castrated" versions of the GPU that NVIDIA GPU launched specific NVIDIA H20 GPU

ally for the Chinese market based on the H100. It can provide up to 296 INT8 TOPS/FP8 TFLOPS of computing power, with 96 GB of HBM3 memory and a memory bandwidth of 4.0 TB/s. The H20 chip is 30 times faster in processing speed than its predecessor, especially in tasks such as providing answers for chatbots.

Impact of US Export Control Policy

On October 17, 2023, the US Department of Commerce updated the export control standards, requiring advanced chips with performance exceeding specific thresholds to apply for export licenses. This policy directly affects NVIDIA's H20 chip. According to the new restrictions, the computing power level of the H20 chip is approximately 50% of the A100 and 15% of the H100, making it more suitable for training and inference of vertical model types, but not easily meeting the training needs of large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters.

Market Risk

Despite the risk of being banned, NVIDIA H20 still sells very well in the Chinese market, with domestic tech giants such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance all purchasing and using it. Forecast data from market research institution SemiAnalysis shows that NVIDIA will ship more than 1 million new NVIDIA H20 accelerator chips to the Chinese market this year, with an expected cost of $12,000 to $13,000 per chip, which is expected to bring NVIDIA more than $12 billion in revenue.

However, if the US government's ban policy is officially implemented, NVIDIA may lose about $12 billion in revenue. This loss will not only have a significant impact on NVIDIA's financial status but may also have a chain reaction on the entire semiconductor industry.

NVIDIA's Response Measures

Faced with the export restrictions of the US government, NVIDIA has not given up on the Chinese market. Instead, they are developing a special AI chip B20 exclusively for the Chinese market to comply with US export control regulations. In addition, NVIDIA is also cooperating with some customers in the Middle East and China to obtain permission from the US government to sell high-performance products, and trying to develop new data center products that comply with government policies and do not require a license.

Performance and Market Response

Compared with other similar products in the international market, the H20 chip has a certain competitive edge in terms of performance. Although its computing power has been greatly reduced, it is more than 20% faster than the H100 in the inference of LLMs. The main computing power parameters of H20, such as FP16 and INT8, are less than half of A100 and only about 1/7 of H100. However, the HBM capacity (96GB) and bandwidth of H20 are much higher than 910B, and the bandwidth is twice that of 910B. This makes H20 somewhat similar to the next-generation super AI chip H200 that will be released next year.

Conclusion

The success of NVIDIA's H20 chip in the Chinese market demonstrates its strong competitiveness in the field of high-end chips. However, with the ban policy of the US government, the future of H20 is full of uncertainty. NVIDIA is actively responding to this challenge by developing new special chips and cooperating with customers to strive to maintain its position in the Chinese market. In any case, this ban storm will undoubtedly have a profound impact on the global semiconductor market.

IC Chip Components Parts

STM32F405RG	STMicroelectronics ARM Cortex-M4 core high-performance microcontroller ic Built-in 1MB of flash memory and 192KB of SRAM Supports external memory extensions such as SDRAM and NOR/NAND flash Not only has a high-performance CPU, but also integrates a variety of peripherals and interfaces Suitabled for embedded system design requiring high processing power, rich peripheral support and low power consumption
USB2517-JZX	Microchip Technology Low Power MTT (Multi-Transaction Converter) hub controller IC Includes on-chip power-on reset (POR), internal 1.8V regulator, fully integrated USB terminal, pull-up/pull-down resistors and more Enhanced EMI suppression and ESD protection Embedded USB solution Flexible power management solution Suitable for embedded systems with strict requirements on power consumption
R35204MTRPBF	Infineon Technologies dual circuit digital multiphase step-down controller Designed for CPU voltage regulation With 3+1 dual outputs, it provides fine voltage regulation and higher efficiency Has IR Efficiency Shaping Features, including dynamic phase control and automatic power state switching Provides I2C, SMBus, PMBus and other interfaces For other applications that require high performance voltage regulation, such as data centers, high performance computing, game consoles, and servers