China’s internet giants are rushing to acquire high-performance Nvidia chips vital for building generative artificial intelligence systems, making orders worth $5bn in a buying frenzy fuelled by fears the US will impose new export controls. Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba have made orders worth $1bn to acquire about 100,000 A800 processors from the US chipmaker to be delivered this year, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The Chinese groups had also purchased a further $4bn worth of the graphics processing units to be delivered in 2024, two people close to Nvidia said. The A800 is a weakened version of Nvidia’s cutting-edge A100 GPU for data centres. Due to export restrictions imposed by Washington last year in a bid to choke Beijing’s technological ambitions, Chinese tech companies are only able to buy A800s, which have slower data transfer rates than A100s. As hype has intensified around AI over the past year, Nvidia’s GPUs have become the hottest commodity among the world’s biggest tech companies to provide computing power for the development of large language AI models. Chinese internet groups are racing to stockpile the A800 chips over fears that the Biden administration is contemplating new export restrictions that would capture even Nvidia’s weakened chips, as well as a wider GPU shortage driven by overwhelming demand.

Full story : China’s internet giants order $5bn of Nvidia chips to power AI ambitions.