China’s stockpile of Nvidia H20 artificial intelligence (AI) processors is likely to run out in about a year now that sales to Chinese customers have been banned by the Trump administration, according to the assessment of several market analysts.
Chinese tech giant Huawei thus must ramp up production of its new Ascend 910C alternative as quickly as possible while other Chinese AI chip designers step up efforts to avoid a chip shortfall in the years ahead.
Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and other Chinese companies ordered between US$12 billion and $16 billion worth of H20 processors, or perhaps even more, in the first quarter of this year, according to various sources. At least one million of the chips were reportedly delivered before shipments were cut off.