NVIDIA's Strategic Blackwell AI Chip for the Chinese Market
NVIDIA seems up for something big for the Chinese AI market. Apparently, rumors suggest that this new chip has been in the works under their Blackwell architecture and is expected to launch any time now. The most striking part. It is said to be way cheaper than their latest H20 AI accelerator, maybe even half the price.
Price Cut: A New Strategy for Regaining Lost Grounds
This doesn't solely deal with price optics but comes under the very aggressive pricing strategy because NVIDIA is in quite a complicated situation in China. Here, particularly, competition emanated from local behemoths like Huawei within an ongoing trade situation in the US, plus the very swinging and unpredictable course of international relations; all of these factors indicated that NVIDIA had to act aggressively to maintain its show.
This little dream seems to be quite clear-cut with regard to the new, cheaper chip: market share. Production may well start by next month, with availability in China sometime in July.
Technical Changes for Cheap Price or Policy Compliance
Naturally, lower prices entail changes in configuration most of the time. Reportedly to make this specific Blackwell chip for consumers in China more accessible and to comply with US export restrictions generally, NVIDIA is making some standard changes:
Change in Memory: Unlike its top AI chips, the site-specific model is expected to have GDDR7 memory instead of HBM. This helps navigate memory bandwidth limitations imposed by US policies.
No CoWoS: This advanced chip-on-wafer-on-substrate packaging technology has appeared as a hallmark of NVIDIA's high-performance GPUs and therefore may also not be present.
This means that while costing cheaper, the performance will most likely be significantly less than NVIDIA's mainstream global offerings. This could widen yet further the AI performance gap between solutions available in China and outside.
Larger Picture: The Challenge for NVIDIA in China
US restrictions started to crimp NVIDIA's sales in China. It had sold millions of such high-end AI GPUs into that market, such as the H100s and A100s. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, sees China as a big $50 billion market, but these restrictions have reduced their access, and market share is said to drop at this point.
The new Blackwell chip goes to bring customers back. It aims to sell well over a million units by the end of the year. But it really is a concession. This is likely not going to be the most powerful AI setup in China; it is expected that Huawei's Ascend 910C will surpass its performance. Here, NVIDIA is going to bet on the much larger software ecosystem called CUDA, which by itself is a tremendous advantage.
What We Should Expect: The B40 or RTX Pro 6000D
In the wake of previous bans on AI accelerators like the Hopper H20, this latest Blackwell-based offering is NVIDIA's next bet within the challenging Chinese market. While the full technical details are still unfolding, some tidbits are becoming evident.
Rumor has it that this new offering will likely be named B40 (perhaps the next generation of the L40) or may fall under the RTX Pro 6000D umbrella. This is categorized as a server-class GPU using GDDR7 and avoiding CoWoS, indicating a simpler monolithic design.
There's speculation about which specific Blackwell silicon it's going to use. It would more than likely not support NVLink, presenting multi-GPU setups with major roadblocks if based on the consumer-grade GB2XX silicon (similar to what's in the RTX 5090). Pricing estimates for this "B40" range from $6,500 to $8,000, making it cheaper than the H20 but close to the global workstation GPU pricing.
NVIDIA might use something like their ConnectX-8 SuperNICs to allow multi-GPU configurations with this chip, yet this is still totally speculation.
It's a developing story, but one thing is clear: NVIDIA is adapting its strategy for China with a focus on accessibility, even if it means compromising on raw power. The success of this new Blackwell chip will depend on how well it balances price, performance, and the enduring strength of NVIDIA's software ecosystem in a fiercely competitive and politically charged market.
