China's chip champions ramp up production of AI accelerators at domestic fabs, but HBM and fab production capacity are towering bottlenecks
Alibaba and Baidu, two of China’s largest cloud providers, have begun shifting workloads to their in-house AI silicon as well. Baidu recently revealed a new version of its Baige training platform that runs entirely on Chinese-made hardware and software, designed to keep its product road map moving without access to the latest Nvidia parts.
Meanwhile, others are trying to work around supply chains. Some Chinese companies have routed training runs through overseas subsidiaries, while others are relying on second-hand or refurbished Nvidia accelerators that predate the latest U.S. rules or procuring chips through grey-market brokers.
With Chinese developers pushing into less mature hardware ecosystems, memory bandwidth is becoming a key constraint. As we reported in September, Chinese memory firms like YMTC and CXMT are exploring HBM production to support domestic accelerators, but no large-scale supply has materialized.
For Nvidia, export restrictions and the growing pivot away from its products in China have eroded its entire share in what was once one of its biggest markets.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/chinas-ai-chip-pivot-accelerates-as-us-export-restrictions-bite#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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