Alibaba Group and Tencent, two of China’s largest cloud providers, have been testing samples of NVIDIA’s new chips since November. The companies told NVIDIA they would buy far fewer new chips than they planned to buy the previous generation. In the short term, local alternatives are becoming increasingly attractive to Chinese buyers. Alibaba and Tencent outsource some of their orders for advanced artificial intelligence chips to Chinese companies such as Huawei Technologies. They are also developing their own artificial intelligence chips. Baidu and ByteDance, owner of video-sharing service TikTok, are also looking for local alternatives.
In 2023, Huawei received orders from major Chinese Internet companies to supply at least 5,000 Ascend 910B accelerators. They are considered the closest native alternative to the high-end NVIDIA A100 chip.
In the long term, Chinese buyers are unsure if NVIDIA can continue supplying chips as U.S. regulators could further tighten restrictions.
Source: Ferra
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