After successfully lobbying the Trump administration to approve the sale of H200 chips to China, Nvidia is now considering ramping up production of the chips as Chinese companies rush to place orders, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources.
More powerful than Nvidia’s previous generation of Hopper graphics processing units (GPUs) for training large language models, the H200 chips previously could not be sold in China, as the previous Biden administration had proposed rules restricting sales of advanced artificial intelligence chips in the country. But the Commerce Department last week gave Nvidia the nod to sell H200 GPUs in China, in exchange for a 25% cut of sales of those chips.
Nvidia is now seeing so much demand from Chinese companies that it is considering adding more capacity, Reuters reported. However, Chinese officials are still deciding whether to allow the import of the H200 chips, which are said to be significantly more powerful than the H20 GPUs that Nvidia had customized to sell in China.
For the chipmaker, expanding production of the H200 GPUs would allow it to tap into pent-up demand in a country struggling to develop its own AI chips. Competition and national security concerns in the West have hindered the availability of the latest and most powerful hardware for training AI models in China, where companies have resorted to focusing on efficiency at sheer scale.
Chinese companies including Alibaba and ByteDance, which develop their own AI models, have already contacted Nvidia to consider large orders for the H200 chips, which are produced in limited quantities, the report added.
“We are managing our supply chain to ensure that licensed sales of the H200 to authorized customers in China will have no impact on our ability to supply customers in the United States,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
