The demand for AI chip repairs in China has surged. A merchant repairs 500 NVIDIA high-end GPUs every month.

At present, there are more than ten small professional companies in the Chinese market specializing in the repair business of high-end chips such as NVIDIA H100 and A100. These chips banned from sale in the United States mainly flow into the country through special channels.On the eve of the release of H100 in September 2022, the US government put it on the list of banned sales to China at the same time as the A100, which has been on the market for two years.

A merchant in Shenzhen with 15 years of experience in repairing Nvidia gaming GPUs switched to AI chip repairs at the end of 2024. His partner said frankly: "The demand for repairs far exceeds expectations."Due to the surge in orders, they established a new company and currently repair 500 NVIDIA AI chips per month on average. To ensure maintenance quality, the company is even equipped with a 256-server test room that can simulate the data center environment.

Due to the ban, NVIDIA is unable to provide official repair services for these restricted products. Sources revealed that in other countries, GPUs that fail under warranty are usually directly replaced. An NVIDIA spokesperson emphasized that only officially authorized channels can provide reliable services, and unauthorized repairs are "not technically and economically feasible."

Although Nvidia was recently approved to sell China's special version of H20 chips, market acceptance is limited.On the one hand, a server with 8 H20 GPUs sells for over one million yuan; on the other hand, although its AI inference performance is excellent, it cannot meet the needs of large language model training.

Industry insiders pointed out that the failure rate of H100/A100 in use in China continues to rise due to long-term high-load operation. The normal life of this type of GPU is usually only 2-5 years.

In terms of maintenance quotations, two service providers in Shenzhen respectively revealed that the basic maintenance fee is 10,000-20,000 yuan per block, or 10% of the original price. Services cover software debugging, hardware repair (fan/circuit board/video memory) and component replacement. It is worth noting that the market demand for the latest B200 chips has already emerged - the domestic asking price of a server equipped with 8 B200 chips has exceeded 3 million yuan.