On December 29, according to Bloomberg News, NVIDIA, the world's largest chipmaker by market value, will officially launch GeForce RTX 4090 D game graphics cards to the Chinese Mainland market. Previously, the U.S. government's updated chip export regulations affected high-end game graphics cards, including RTX 4090. As of the close on December 28th local time, Nvidia closed up 0.21% at $495.22 per share. The stock has risen 1.09% in the past five trading days and has risen 239.24% since the beginning of this year, with a market value exceeding $1200 billion.
The GeForce RTX 4090 D is a product specifically launched by Nvidia to China in response to the latest US government export control measures. A Nvidia spokesperson stated in an email, "The design of the GeForce RTX 4090 D complies with US government export controls and will only be sold in China."
According to NVIDIA's official website, the number of CUDA cores for RTX 4090 D has been reduced from 16384 to 14592, a decrease of about 10%; The basic frequency of the GPU core has been increased from 2.23GHz to 2.28GHz; The graphics memory is 24GB 384bit GDDR6X; The total power consumption of the graphics card is 425W; Regular game power consumption is 302W. In terms of performance, Nvidia claims that the energy consumption of the graphics card is close to 75% of the RTX 3090 Ti. In addition, the product adopts the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture, supports NVIDIA DLSS 3, and can be used for 3D rendering, video editing, and graphic design. The starting price is 12999 yuan and it will be gradually launched in January 2024.
On the evening of October 17, 2023, the Biden administration announced plans to officially introduce a series of new restrictions, including restrictions on the export of more advanced artificial intelligence AI chips and semiconductor equipment. In addition, due to the new measures to modify the parameter specifications, the high-end gaming graphics card NVIDIA RTX 4090 was also affected for the first time. At that time, the Chinese market launched a wave of graphics card price increases both online and offline, causing a series of chain reactions. As early as October 7, 2022, export control measures in the United States included export restrictions on high-performance computing chips. Nvidia's A100 chip performance indicators were the limiting standards, but Nvidia subsequently launched an alternative version A800 that met the control measures.
Under various pressures, Nvidia's attitude is very clear and will not give up on the Chinese market. Nvidia stated that it had extensive contact with the US government during the development of the GeForce RTX 4090 D. On December 6th, during his visit to Singapore, NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun stated that he would provide a new set of products that comply with the latest regulations of the US government for the Chinese market. The reason behind this is that the Chinese market contributes about 20% of NVIDIA's revenue.
In 2023, as the AI wave swept across the world, Nvidia, known as the "shovel man" company, also turned its tables. On November 22, after market hours in the United States, Nvidia released its third quarter financial report for the 2024 fiscal year (as of October 2023). According to the financial report, Nvidia achieved a revenue of 18.12 billion US dollars during the period, an increase of 206% year-on-year; The net profit was 9.243 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 1259%. The double increase in revenue is mainly due to the strong growth trend of data center business and the recovery of gaming business. The revenue of the data center business in the third quarter was 14.51 billion US dollars, with a year-on-year increase of 279%; The revenue of the gaming business in the third quarter was $2.86 billion, an increase of 81% compared to the same period last year, and these two parts accounted for 95.86% of Nvidia's total revenue.
The new policy of expanding chip export restrictions by the US government has been required to be implemented in advance, which has also resulted in numerous orders from Nvidia being unable to be delivered. Colette Kress, Chief Financial Officer of Nvidia, stated at the company's third quarter performance briefing that data center revenue from China and other affected regions will significantly decrease in the fourth quarter due to the impact of US tightening policies. "Export controls have a negative impact on our Chinese business, and even in the long run, we cannot clearly understand the severity of this impact."
Previously, according to sources cited by media such as Caixin, Nvidia plans to launch three "customized" chips specifically for export to the Chinese market when the new regulations come into effect in the United States. These three chips are initially named HGXH20, L20PCle, and L2PCle, and are substitutes developed based on the banned A800 and H800. These chips, although somewhat reduced in computing power, retain most of the functions of the original chips. Regarding this, Colette Kress confirmed that Nvidia is developing new compliant chips for China, but these will not make a substantial contribution to fourth quarter revenue.