China’s AI industry is quietly turning to refurbished and second-hand Nvidia GPUs after fresh curbs on the company’s H20 accelerator left customers scrambling for alternatives. The H20, a cut-down Hopper-based GPU designed specifically to comply with U.S. export restrictions, was meant to keep Nvidia in the Chinese market. But the chip has been effectively sidelined following the resumption of H20 exports in July, after Chinese regulators raised data security concerns and effectively banned purchases of the chip. According to a recent report by Digitimes, this has led to surging demand for older A100 and H100 cards as firms strip down and reconfigure them into “low-cost, high-performance” custom inference systems. Inference is less compute-intensive than training. Models don’t require full floating-point precision, and workloads can run efficiently on hardware that’s been trimmed or reconfigured. That’s why even an A100, launched back in 2020, remains valuable in some use cases.

Full report : Chinese firms turn to used Nvidia GPUs following Beijing H20 crackdown — industry reports ‘surge’ in A100 and H100 chips being stripped and repurposed.