September 11 news, according to Bloomberg, Wei Shaojun, chairman of the Integrated Circuit Design Branch of the China Semiconductor Industry Association and a professor at Tsinghua University, said at an industry forum held in Singapore recently that Asian countries, including China, should abandon the use of Nvidia GPUs for artificial intelligence development to reduce dependence on Nvidia. He warned that Asian companies are particularly likely to be subject to U.S. technology.
"Unfortunately, we Asian countries, including China, are following the U.S. in developing AI algorithms and large models (using Nvidia's GPUs)," said Wei Shaojun, an academic who has advised officials for years. He added that continuing on this path could be "fatal" for these areas.
As the United States has continued to increase restrictions in recent years to prevent Chinese companies from obtaining the most cutting-edge AI chips, local Chinese companies have also been working hard to solve the shortage of Nvidia artificial intelligence accelerators. China's own chip manufacturing technology is still several years behind the most advanced chip manufacturing technology in the world today.
But the emergence of DeepSeek at the beginning of this year showed that Chinese companies can still improve their artificial intelligence algorithms without the most advanced AI chips. Although Nvidia's H20 chip was banned for several months this year and regained permission to export to China, its safety has been questioned by Chinese officials, which has also forced Chinese technology companies to have reservations about continuing to purchase H20 chips.
Wei Shaojun noted that China should focus on creating a new type of chip designed for large-scale model development, rather than continuing to rely on the GPU architecture originally designed to power games and industrial graphics, but he did not elaborate on the specific details of the new architecture.
Wei Shaojun also added that although China has been sanctioned by the United States for many years, China is still strong in building its own chip industry and has enough funds to do so.