According to media reports, Nvidia has informed Chinese customers that the company will postpone the release of the new China-specific AI chip, which may not be launched until the first quarter of next year.。

Sources said that the delayed chip is H20, which is one of the three chips developed by Nvidia to comply with the new US chip export restrictions for the Chinese market, and is the most powerful of them.。

It is reported that the H20 will provide 96GB of memory, 4Tb / s memory bandwidth and 296 teraFLOPS FP8 performance.。Although the overall performance of this chip is much lower than that of the H200, the chip is expected to perform 20% faster than the legacy H100 in AI inference workloads。

Originally, Nvidia was expected to launch new products as early as mid-November.。But now sources say the release of the H20 has been pushed back to February or March.。

Regarding the reason for the delay, people familiar with the matter said Nvidia's explanation to customers was because the server manufacturer had problems integrating chips.。

In addition to the H20, Nvidia plans to introduce two more chips - the L20 and L2 - to comply with new U.S. export rules.。Sources said there would be no delay in the launch of the L20 and it would be released as originally planned.。Information on L2 was not disclosed.。

In November 2022, about a month after the United States first banned the export of advanced microchips and equipment to China, the A800 was launched as a replacement for Chinese customers.。Nvidia then launched the Hopper-based H800 earlier this year.。These two chips were subsequently used by a number of Chinese companies to train artificial intelligence models.。

In October, as Washington tightened export restrictions。This time not only increased restrictions, but also extended the scope of restricted countries to countries such as the Middle East outside of China.。As a result, Nvidia has been banned from selling products including AI chips such as A800 and H800.。In response to the new rules, Nvidia had to start working on new low-profile chips - H20, L20 and L2。

According to SemiAnalysis, the H20, L20 and L2 are likely to be the "low-profile versions" of Nvidia's H200, L40 and L4.。At the same time, according to SemiAnalysis's analysis of the chip specifications, H20, L20 and L2 will contain most of the latest features that Nvidia can use for artificial intelligence work, but in order to comply with the new US rules, some computing power indicators of these chips are reduced。Nvidia is betting on new chips, including H20, to help it maintain market share in China。

Nvidia's efforts to identify loopholes in export restrictions to provide AI chips to Chinese customers and other restricted markets have attracted a lot of criticism.。But Nvidia has to do this even if it is "criticized," and the company is really reluctant to part with such a large market.。

Publicly available information shows that Nvidia contributed about 20-25% of its data center revenue from restricted countries and regions such as China in the past quarter.。Nvidia expects data center revenue from China and other affected regions to drop significantly in the fourth quarter。

Under export restrictions, the chip market in China and other places began to appear blank。Take the Chinese market as an example, this market vacuum is gradually being filled by local suppliers.。It is estimated that China's domestic chip market is about $7 billion。

Earlier this month, there were media reports that Baidu ordered 1,600 Huawei Xunteng 910B artificial intelligence chips for its 200 servers to replace NVIDIA chips.。Although Huawei's Sagittarius chips are still considered to lag behind Nvidia's chips in terms of performance, within China, Sagittarius chips are still in the lead.。

Now, Nvidia's delay in releasing new chips such as H20 may not help the company maintain market share in China。Although Nvidia is still the first choice for many companies to buy chips, many companies in China are seeking to diversify their chip suppliers given the risk of supply outages due to export restrictions.。

It's worth noting that Nvidia isn't the only chipmaker to reduce the performance of its chips in order to comply with U.S. export restrictions.。Earlier this year, Intel released a tweaked version of the Habana Gaudi accelerator, which the company said would be geared toward the Chinese market.。However, this version was also banned from export after the latest round of restrictions.。In addition, AMD also said that it is willing to overcome the difficulties of export restrictions and continue to sell chips in the Chinese market, but it is not clear what the company's specific implementation plan is.。