Currently, Nvidia's H20, which has lower performance than its high-end GPUs, was adjusted to comply with U.S. export control regulations but failed to meet the new National Development and Reform Commission requirements. As relevant regulations have not yet been strictly enforced, H20 sales in the Chinese market are still strong.
The report pointed out that if the National Development and Reform Commission decides to strengthen the implementation of these regulations, NVIDIA's annual US$17 billion business in the Chinese market will face threats, and this will also bring huge incremental opportunities to domestic AI artificial intelligence industry chains such as Huawei.
According to a person familiar with the matter, in response to this situation, Nvidia has prepared to adjust the H20 chip to make it comply with the energy efficiency requirements of the National Development and Reform Commission.
However, this technological adjustment will reduce the efficiency of the chip and weaken its competitiveness in the Chinese market.
Recently, due to the strong market demand for China's leading AI model DeepSeek, Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance are significantly increasing their purchases of Nvidia H20. According to people familiar with the matter, this trend is driven by the boom in China's AI market after the launch of DeepSeek's efficient inference model.
In addition, the market expects that the United States may further tighten restrictions on Nvidia's chip sales to China. In January, Bloomberg reported that Washington was considering including H20 chips in new restrictions.