Nvidia says 'We never deprive American customers in order to serve the rest of the world'
Nvidia's China-exclusive RTX 6000D reportedly gets lukewarm reception in China due to hobbled performance
With around half of the world's leading AI developers living and working in China, Nvidia wants those users working with its GPUs, harnessing the CUDA platform. But if those developers can't get Nvidia GPUs, they can't use CUDA, meaning that they'll use something else. We saw the first examples of how quickly this can happen at the end of September, when the latest DeepSeek model included support for China-native chips and the CANN platform, developed by Huawei.
CANN is also open source , which will aid in its adoption in China and elsewhere, and industry alliances of Chinese AI firms may help to consolidate their efforts in pushing away from Nvidia's near-monopoly.
Though DeepSeek still supports CUDA, its developers are encouraging users to leverage the TileLang kernel for prototyping instead. Although these models and the associated domestic hardware may not be as capable as Nvidia's platforms yet, China has a number of levers it can pull to make them more competitive .
Long-term investments from China make it clear that it wants to control its own destiny when it comes to the latest hardware. Its domestic chip suppliers are ramping up, and the investment is there to help that continue. But it will take time, and until that inflection point happens, Nvidia wants to have enough of a foot in the door that its relevance will never evaporate completely. Unfortunately for Nvidia, the U.S. government is loosening the company's control.
China purchased most of the million-plus Nvidia HGX H20 GPUs that were produced last year, and GPUs were also smuggled into the country. DeepSeek R2 was trained using Nvidia chips , despite a push by the authorities to use domestic chips instead. China's chips cannot compete when it comes to training workloads quite yet.
If Nvidia has one saving grace, it is that the chip industry is enormous, expensive, and takes time to change. China may want its own domestic chip supply, and it may have a decent AI development framework, and its hardware may even be pretty good for inference, even if it's not quite as efficient. But there's no denying that Nvidia and other Western companies are years ahead of even China's best, likely due to the lack of advanced EUV lithography machines, which are required to develop the latest cutting-edge nodes.
There are plenty of reasons that China views Taiwan through such hungry eyes, and access to tools which can produce the most cutting-edge process technologies is undoubtedly one of them. Even if China can convert a huge portion of its AI industry to using domestic chips and push for the development of its own domestic supply chains, those are going to take years to build up, and without ASML's advanced tools, they may be on the back foot. But, how long that will hold up for remains to be seen.
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Jon Martindale Freelance Writer Jon Martindale is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. For the past 20 years, he's been writing about PC components, emerging technologies, and the latest software advances. His deep and broad journalistic experience gives him unique insights into the most exciting technology trends of today and tomorrow.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-wants-chinas-market-share-to-secure-the-future-of-cuda-in-the-region-americas-trade-war-threatens-huangs-influence-and-could-bolster-competition#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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