When NVIDIA began preparing the H20 GPU for the Chinese market, the company expected high demand for GPUs that comply with sanctions. Now, we have learned that the company has generated an impressive $12 billion in revenue from its Chinese operations. The demand for NVIDIA GPUs in China is so significant that AI research labs in the country are purchasing as many as they can. According to a report from the Financial Times, citing SemiAnalysis as a source, NVIDIA is projected to sell over one million H20 GPUs in China. This number surpasses the planned acquisition of "only" 550,000 home-grown Huawei Ascend 910B accelerators by Chinese companies. It remains uncertain whether Chinese semiconductor manufacturers like SMIC can increase chip production or if the demand is not as high, but the popularity of NVIDIA H20 chips is evident.
The Huawei Ascend 910B boasts a Total Processing Performance (TPP) metric developed by the US Government to measure GPU performance, with a rating of over 5,000 TeraFLOPS times bit-length. In comparison, the NVIDIA H20 has a TPP of 2,368, which is half of the Huawei accelerator's performance on paper. However, SemiAnalysis suggests that the real-world performance of the H20 GPU is superior due to its improved memory configuration, including higher HBM3 memory bandwidth. This makes the H20 a more attractive option than the Ascend 910B accelerator, leading to an estimated shipment of over one million GPUs in China this year. With an average price of $12,000 per NVIDIA H20 GPU, the $12 billion revenue generated in China will undoubtedly boost NVIDIA's profits in 2024.
