On the evening of January 20th, according to media reports, Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun visited Nvidia's offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen this week to attend the annual conference in China. This is Huang Renxun's first visit to Chinese Mainland after several years.
Images and videos spread on social media show that Huang Renxun was wearing "Northeast Big Flower" and holding a two person rotating handkerchief at NVIDIA's Shanghai annual conference, twisting his body with music and colleagues.
Meanwhile, a NVIDIA Beijing employee confirmed the authenticity of the above information to a reporter from Time Weekly. He shared a photo with Huang Renxun on social media and said, "I didn't win at the annual meeting, but at the after party, I received Lao Huang's embrace and a photo. His gentleness was left to the employees."
On January 21st, a reporter from Time Weekly contacted Nvidia officials regarding the details of Huang Renxun's visit to China and the subsequent layout of the Chinese market. As of the time of publication, no response has been received.
Obviously, China is a market that chip giants cannot miss. On January 18th, at a regular press conference of the Ministry of Commerce, spokesperson He Yadong responded to foreign media questions about Nvidia chips by saying, "China is one of the major semiconductor markets in the world. We welcome semiconductor companies and products from all countries to enter China, share opportunities, and achieve win-win development.".
In the past decade, Huang Renxun's intentions conveyed in various public occasions have also been very clear - hoping to find more partners in the Chinese market.
Back in 2013, Huang Renxun attended the Xiaomi press conference as a guest. At that time, the flagship version of Xiaomi 3 was equipped with the Nvidia Tegra4 processor mobile version. Huang Renxun shouted the slogan "Xiaomi is Mighty" in Chinese at the press conference.
Six years later, Huang Renxun's another representative visit to China was at the NVIDIA GTC conference held in Suzhou in 2019, where he gave a two-hour speech in English. The focus of the speech is on the new trends in AI transformation and Nvidia's latest developments in multiple industries such as autonomous driving, gaming, and healthcare.
In the first half of last year, the market also heard that Huang Renxun was going to visit Chinese Mainland, but he failed to do so.
In the past two years, with the help of AI whirlwind and trillion yuan market value, Nvidia has become the focus of the public. At the end of 2022, generative AI represented by ChatGPT became popular, driving a surge in demand for Nvidia GPUs in the entire AI market.
Throughout 2023, Nvidia's stock price rose nearly 240%, marking the largest annual increase since 2001. As of the close on January 19th local time, Nvidia closed up 4.17%, reaching a new historical high with its stock price approaching $600 and market value reaching $1.47 trillion.
Nvidia's A100/H100 GPU has become a target for many AI manufacturers to purchase. However, due to the new semiconductor export control regulations introduced by the United States in October 2022, Nvidia A100 and H100's exports to China were restricted. Nvidia had to launch a customized "down to standard" version of the A800 and H800 for the Chinese market.
In October of the following year, the United States further upgraded restrictions, which not only prevented Nvidia's AI GPUs from exporting to China, but also restricted the high-end graphics card RTX 4090.
At the end of November 2023, Huang Renxun stated at the DealBook Summit hosted by The New York Times, "We are a company born for business, and we will do our best to do business with everyone.". Chinese Mainland is still the largest chip market, and Nvidia hopes to continue to devote itself to the development of the Chinese market. Nvidia is currently developing specialized chips for the Chinese market, which will not violate US export control regulations.
He further pointed out that the restrictions on US semiconductor exports to China have further stimulated China's determination to develop its independent semiconductor industry. At present, dozens of companies in Chinese Mainland are developing technologies that can compete with Nvidia's products, which is also detrimental to Nvidia's development in the Chinese market.
Regarding the news that Chinese companies are no longer purchasing Nvidia chips in the market and instead purchasing domestically produced chips such as Huawei, spokesperson He Yadong from the Ministry of Commerce also stated, "It is recommended to inquire about specific business activities from the companies. If this situation occurs, I think the reason is also obvious. China opposes interference by relevant countries in normal semiconductor trade and normal communication and cooperation between enterprises."
Nvidia's third quarter report for the 2024 fiscal year showed a total revenue of $38.819 billion in the first three quarters, a year-on-year increase of 85.53%; The net profit attributable to the parent company was 17.475 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 491.57%.
However, Colette Kress, Chief Financial Officer of Nvidia, stated at the third quarter performance briefing that China and other regions affected by the US government's new export regulations are expected to experience a significant decline in sales in the next quarter, with these regions contributing 20% to 25% of data center business revenue in recent quarters. Therefore, Nvidia stated that it will soon launch upgraded computing chips such as H20 in the Chinese market to meet the needs of Chinese customers.
Although Nvidia is developing the latest improved version of AI chips for the Chinese market, according to industry insiders, the overall computing power of HGX H20 chips specifically designed for China is about 80% lower than Nvidia's high-end chip H100 GPU, which is only about 20% of the overall computing power performance of H100. The performance is castrated, but the price is not much cheaper.
Previously, it was reported that since November 2023, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and other large Chinese cloud computing companies have been testing the new AI chip samples provided by Nvidia. They have indicated to Nvidia that the number of chips ordered from Nvidia this year will be far less than the Nvidia high-performance chips originally planned to be purchased.
In the eyes of industry insiders, an important purpose of Huang Renxun's visit to China may be to stabilize his team and top clients. However, this speculation has not yet been confirmed by Nvidia.
However, outside the Chinese market, Nvidia may receive a large order in the near future. On January 18th local time, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of social media giant Meta, announced that Meta is planning to build its own AGI, which is an AI that can reach or surpass human intelligence levels in the vast majority of fields. In order to build infrastructure that supports AGI's vision, Meta plans to acquire approximately 350000 H100 GPUs from Nvidia by the end of this year. Including other GPUs, the total computing power possessed by Meta will be close to the computing power that can be provided by the 600000 H100.