Foreign investment banks: No Chinese company will place an order with NVIDIA H20

According to news on August 25, foreign media wccftech quoted a latest report purportedly from the investment bank Jefferies as saying that the H20 chip of the artificial intelligence chip manufacturer NVIDIA has been banned from purchasing due to doubts about safety issues. Therefore, Chinese manufacturers have stopped purchasing H20.

The report, purportedly from investment bank Jefferies, said, “Our industry investigation shows that China has officially banned the purchase of H20 and other ‘downgraded US artificial intelligence chips’ until further notice. As a result, Chinese manufacturers have now also stopped purchasing Nvidia AI GPUs, which seems to be more stringent than previous rumors (using at least 50% domestic AI chips).

Nvidia's H20 GPU has been at the center of trade tensions between the United States and China. After the U.S. Trump administration granted Nvidia a license to sell H20 GPUs in China, Nvidia hoped to resume H20 sales in the Chinese market and agreed to share 15% of H20 sales with the U.S. government. However, along came Chinese officials' doubts about its safety. Although Intel has always denied that its chips have "backdoors" and other security issues, it has not dispelled Chinese officials' concerns. In addition, the performance of H20 is severely reduced, and its low cost performance is also a problem.

Jefferies pointed out that "no Chinese company will place an order with Nvidia H20." The investment bank also added that its channel investigation in Taiwan reached the same results as media reports. Jefferies said: "Our industry investigation in Taiwan also indicates that Nvidia has suspended all manufacturing and server production work related to H20, also 'until further notice.'" As a result, Jefferies concluded that Nvidia will not be able to generate any AI chip revenue from China, "likely until the United States and China reach an agreement on trade."

If the report is true, Nvidia may reveal a more pessimistic outlook for the Chinese market when it is about to announce its financial results.