China figures large in nearly everything-- from international diplomacy to semiconductor technology -- so it’s no surprise that Nvidia would be at the center of both topics, as the company designs and sells GPUs to Chinese companies as it does throughout much of the world.
Meanwhile, Nvidia and other US companies have to comply with US trade sanctions on products sold into China because the US government is concerned the Chinese government could use the technology to undermine US security interests, or even offer the technology to Russia to further its war in Ukraine.
For Nvidia and many US companies that rely on Asian fabs for manufacture and assembly of the chips they have designed and want to sell products like iPhones to millions of Chinese residents, talking about trade relationships throughout Asia can be akin to walking on eggs.
Further, the concern over the popularity in the US over TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has raised worries in the US Congress about privacy and data security. The TikTok CEO is appearing Thursday in a hearing before the the US House Energy and Commerce Committee, which wants to grill him over TikTok’s relationship with the Chinese Community Party.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stepped into the middle of his company’s relationship with Chinese companies at its GTC Spring 2023 conference, noting that the company has announced its Hopper GPU will have a Chinese version that meets US export rules. That version is a variation of its H100 GPU to be sold as the H800 in China. US export rules prevented Nvidia from selling its A100 and H100 to Chinese customers. The rules said GPU exports must have chip-to-chip data transfer rates below 600 GBps. On the A100, Nvidia trimmed the GPU’s 600 GBps down to 400 GBps and rebranded it as the A800 for the Chinese market. The same approach is being used with the H100, known as the H800 for China.
“Whatever the export restrictions are, whatever the laws and regulations in any country are, we comply with it, in word and spirit,” Huang told reporters. “We know the [US] specification, specifically, and it is very, very clear and not ambiguous, and so we comply with the regulations…”
But Huang, who is Taiwanese American, also knows his customer base and was careful to credit China’s technology companies. “China has some extraordinary tech companies that are building products and services that have great social good,” he said. (A few leaders of other chip companies have said similar things in recent months, adding that they worry export rules might quash innovation between China and other countries and somehow hinder the ability to hire Chinese scientists and share research.)
“We also know that China does a lot of computing, and we recognize that computing consumes a lot of power today,” Huang added. “One of the greatest challenges in China today is the great desire to achieve carbon neutrality. And their data centers, like all of the data centers around the world, are suffering from the end of Moore’s Law. They can’t continue to expand their computing without some way of acceleration. And so Nvidia’s accelerated computing solution helps them take workload that used to take thousands of CPUs and reduce it down to a few GPUs…
“If we don’t help China and we don’t help every country accelerate their workload, the amount of consumption of power needed for computing is just going to keep on growing. We understand the limits of export control very clearly. And with that, we still have lotso of opportunity and lots of impertives, both social and global imperatives, to help Chinese companies continue to advance and use the best technology.”
Huang also noted that the China technology industry has developed prowess around mobile technology. While the PC revolution and internet were very favorable to the US, he said mobile computing was “very helpful to the creation of the China technology industry. They showed up exactly at the right time of mobile cloud.”
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