Nvidia, AMD Cooking Up China Workaround? AI Chipmakers Said To Be Tweaking Chip Designs To Meet Soaring Demand
Synopsis
The two AI stalwarts reportedly plan to launch the new China chips as early as July.
Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), which took a $4.5 billion first-quarter hit from the China chip restrictions imposed by the U.S. government, and artificial intelligence peer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are reportedly readying China-specific high-performance computing chips that could be used for AI workloads.
Taiwanese publication Digitimes reported that the two AI stalwarts are quickly adjusting their chip designs to reduce specifications and plan to launch the new China chips as early as July.
Nvidia’s chips, based on the newest Blackwell architecture, go by the codename B20, and the one from AMD’s stable is dubbed Radeon AI PRO R9700. Both models can support the large-language models of the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek.
DeepSeek recently quietly released an upgrade to its R1 reasoning model, which it hopes will allow it to compete with rival offerings from major players such as OpenAI.
Along with the Radeon AI PRO R9700, AMD is also competing other products, which are specially designed for AI workstations to accelerate local inference, model fine-tuning and other data-intensive workflows.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang clarified earlier this month that the company’s next chip for China, after the H20 chip, built as a workaround for the U.S. China chip curbs, will not be based on the Hopper architecture.
Huang has on more than one occasion called for lowering the export curbs before American companies lose market share to homegrown rivals such as Huawei.
Reports said in late April that Huawei has begun manufacturing AI chips that could compete with some of Nvidia's high-end offerings.
On Wednesday, during Nvidia’s first-quarter earnings call, he said the $50 billion Chinese market is effectively closed to the U.S. industry due to the restrictions in place.
According to the Digitimes report, demand for these HPC chips from Chinese customers has been high.
Nvidia stock is up merely 0.4% for the year, while AMD stock is down over 6%.
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