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Alibaba's new AI chip: Key specifications comparable to H20
- pixelesque 1y agoNote also that today China has told its tech companies to cancel any NVIDIA AI chip orders and not to order any more: https://www.ft.com/content/12adf92d-3e34-428a-8d61-c9169511915c https://www.ft.com/content/12adf92d-3e34-428a-8d61-c91695119...
- MaoSYJ 1y ago“grey market” smugglers gonna keep working on it
- givemeethekeys 1y agoUntil now it was perfectly legal to buy nVidia chips in China. It was the US that was blocking export.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoWhich way though? From the USA to China or China to the USA?
- pxc 1y agoIs this supposed to signal confidence in the chips already available on China's domestic chip market, or is it primarily aimed at boosting that market to make it ready?
- TrainedMonkey 1y agoMy cynical view is that it's mostly trade war and nationalism. If you follow the official PRC position, the chips are already made in China because TW is CN... Practically buying TW chips is boosting it's economy and hence funding it's military so from that perspective that makes sense. From long term development perspective this will absolutely boost national market... however that will take an insane amount of time. If you buy into AI is going to change everything hype, this move is a huge handicap and hence a boon to external economies. And I am probably missing a ton of viewpoints... politics meh
- deadfoxygrandpa 1y agoif you don't know what you're talking about you don't have to say anything, you know
- acdha 1y agoI think those are both the case: they’re telling Chinese companies to invest in domestic hardware–implicitly also saying things like being prepared to stop using CUDA–and that means the hardware vendors know not to skimp on getting there (a nicer version of burning the landing boats on the beach). It’s also an interesting signal to the rest of the world that they’re going to be an option. American tech companies should be looking at what BYD is doing to Tesla, but they’re also dealing with a change in government to be more like Chinese levels of control but with less maturity.
- bsder 1y agoYes. :) How big a deal is it to be on the cutting edge with this? Given that models seem to be flattening out because they can't get any more data, the answer is "not as much as you would think". Consequently, a generation or 2 behind is annoying, but not fatal. In addition, if you pump the memory up, you can paper over a lot of performance loss. Look at how many people bought amped up Macs because the unified memory was large even though the processing units were underpowered relative to NVIDIA or AMD. The biggest problem is software. And China has a lot of people to throw at software. The entire RISC-V ecosystem basically only exists because Chinese grad students have been porting everything in the universe over to it. So, the signal is to everybody around this that the Chinese government is going to pump money at this. And that's a big deal. People always seem to forget that Moore's Law is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but doesn't just happen out of thin air. It happens because a lot of companies pump a lot of money at the engineering because falling off the semiconductor hamster wheel is death. The US started the domestic hamster wheel with things like VHSIC. TSMC was a direct result of the government pumping money at it. China can absolutely kickstart this for themselves if the money goes where it should. I'm really torn about this. On the one hand, I hate what China does on many, many political fronts. On the other hand, tech monopolies are pillaging us all and, with no anti-trust action anywhere in the West, the only way to thwart them seems to be by China coming along and ripping them apart.
- OrvalWintermute 1y agoArguably, the leading RISC-V IP is from US firms like SiFive; it has also caught major traction with NVDA in custom products, and US Govt for various industries, and even Redhat is now supporting RH on Risc-V Microchip Inc partnered w US Govt on the aerospace angle and funded Canonical for linux ports. Their Polarfires and now Euro aerospace like Gaisler are heading in the same direction. US Govt/DARPA and others have been funding risc-v ports for years, to include mainly automated porting. There are big differences between lowend profile-challenged SBCs and the work of NVDA, Microchip Inc, and the US Govt in the much more highend GPU related, and safety critical industries. With Heavyweights like IBM/Redhat now on risc-v joining canonical and others, the SW side is definitely improving TSMC btw, has always been about labor arbitrage
- belter 1y ago200% tariff incoming :-) "Speaker Johnson says China is straining U.S. relations with Nvidia chip ban" - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/17/china-us-nvidia-chip-ban.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/17/china-us-nvidia-chip-ban.htm... Translation: "We are angry with China that they wont let the US undermine itself, and sell its strategic advantages to them..."
- littlestymaar 1y ago> "Speaker Johnson says China is straining U.S. relations with Nvidia chip ban" Oh, the irony.
- arbuge 1y agoAre they allowed to rent them from server farms, datacenters, etc. located outside China that are able to procure them?
- tonyhart7 1y ago"Are they allowed to rent them from server farms, datacenters, etc. located outside China that are able to procure them?" alicloud has many cluster outside china, so they probably can because many friendly country with china has it but it would be the same with US power play, they only permit anyone that they accept
- UltraSane 1y agoThat is going to really slow LLM development in China. But more GPUs for everyone else!
- sameermanek 1y agoI mean, progress is already getting slow in llm development space and their qwen models are, well, good enough for time being. Meanwhile, its good for the world that they are working on their own chips, that way nVidia will have to stop being comfortable. This is step in good direction for everyone except nvidia and its chinese distribution network
- ponector 1y agoThey have more electric power (also cheaper), more data centers. I bet AI development will be slower elsewhere.
- kimixa 1y agoYup - at some level of scale it's very much an infrastructure game. No amount of trade war politics will make up for a lack in infrastructure investment.
- xadhominemx 1y agoIn 24 months, US hyperscalers will be training models on GPUs/XPUs with 16A process technology and HBM4E. The gap between the raw processing power of US and Chinese AI hardware will be widening.
- jamiek88 1y agoI wish I had your confidence being able to forecast 24 months ahead. In 24 months TSMC could be a smoking crater. There won’t be 16A manufacturing here in the USA. Probably ever. We live in extremely dangerous uncertain times. Any forecast that long is worthless.
- rapsey 1y ago[flagged]
- narrator 1y agoDialectical Materialism much?
- smokefoot 1y agoChinese semiconductor dominance is not imminent and US containment has been somewhat effective. I don’t think that will hold on a generational timeline, but it will be hard to overcome.
- rapsey 1y agoSemiconductor lead is inevitably going to fall within the decade. So will the military hopes of ever protecting Taiwan.
- sampullman 1y agoThat's a very pessimistic take, or optimistic I guess, depending on perspective. Looking at the Chinese semiconductor development trajectory, and considering that TSMC won't be sitting on their hands, "within a decade" seems really unlikely.
- rapsey 1y agoTaiwan and China are not like north and south korea. People move between countries freely. Many TSMC engineers have moved to the mainland. China has immense engineering capability and is replicating the entire western semiconductor supply chain within its borders. They have the money, the engineering capability, the will and full support from the government. It is inevitable.
- sampullman 1y agoI am aware, I live in Taiwan. While TSMC engineers can be poached "move between countries freely" is not true because moving from China to Taiwan is not so easy. The key word you mention is "replicating." They'll be chasing for a while still, and it's not clear that they'll be able to leap ahead. Copying is much easier than real innovation.
- cedws 1y agoApparently DeepSeek’s new model has been delayed due to issues with the Huawei chips they’re using. Maybe raw floating point performance of Chinese chips is competitive with NVIDIA, but clearly there’s still a lot of issues to iron out.
- maxglute 1y agoReported by one of the more least credible PRC reporters on FT who should be thoroughly ignored.
- elp 1y agoI'm sure there are LOTS of issues that need to be addressed, but the demand for the chips are so high that the incentives are overwhelmingly in favor of this continuing. If the reported margins on the Nvidia chips are as high as the claims make it out to be (73+% ??) this will easily find a world wide market. It was also frustratingly predictable from the moment the US started trying to limit the sales of the chips. America has slowed the speed of Chinese AI development by a tiny number of years, if that, in return for losing total domination of the GPU market.
- smokefoot 1y agoI mean, I don’t know how long the NVIDIA moats can hold. With this much money at stake, others will challenge their dominance especially in a market as diverse and fragmented as advanced semiconductors. That’s not to say I’m brave enough to short NVDA.
- notfried 1y agoIf CUDA isn't that strong of a moat/tie-in and Chinese tech companies can seemingly reasonably migrate to these chips, why hasn't AMD been able to compete more aggressively with nVidia on a US/global scale when they had a much longer head start?
- eunos 1y agoBecause Cuda moat in China is wrecked artificially by political reason rather than technical reason
- nextworddev 1y agoThis is the right answer
- chii 1y agoAMD probably don't have chinese state backing, presumably, where profit is less of a concern and they can do it unprofitably for many years (decades even) as long as the end outcome is dominance.
- dworks 1y agoMost chipmakers in China are making or have made their new generation of products CUDA-compatible.
- brookst 1y ago1. AMD isn’t different enough. They’d be subject to the same export restrictions and political instability as Nvidia, so why would global companies switch to them? 2. CUDA has been a huge moat, but the incentives are incredibly strong for everybody except Nvidia to change that. The fact that it was an insurmountable moat five years ago in a $5B market does not mean it’s equally powerful in a $300B market. 3. AMD’s culture and core competencies are really not aligned to playing disruptor here. Nvidia is generally more agile and more experimental. It would have taken a serious pivot years ago for AMD to be the right company to compete.
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- torginus 1y agoThere's a very important point made in the article - with recent export controls, domestic Chinese firms don't need to beat Nvidia's best, but only the cut-down chips cleared for Chinese export.
- jarym 1y agoThe AI race is like the nuclear arms race. Countries like China will devote an inordinate amount of resources to be the best - it may take a year or two, but in the grand scheme of things that is nothing. And NVIDIA will lose its dominance for the simple reason that the Chinese companies can serve the growing number of countries under US sanctions. I even suspect it won't be long before the US will try to sanction any allies that buy Chinese AI chips!
- WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago> And NVIDIA will lose its dominance They are vendor locking industries, i don't think they'll loose their dominance, however, vendor locked companies will loose their competitiveness
- greenpizza13 1y ago"lose" not "loose" please.
- rhetocj23 1y agoChina and Russia collectively have a talent pool dense enough to build future products and services the rest of the world uses, if China can produce comparative hardware for AI. Simple example being TikTok. Its just a matter of time really.
- cshores 1y agoEverything in china is a copy though. Even your example TikTok is a Vine clone
- jarym 1y agoOne of these headlines in the next few months will spark a US market selloff greater than what we saw on the initial DeepSeek release. I believe about 1000 S&P points down - to just above the trade war lows from April.
- aurareturn 1y agoUS government f'ed over Nvidia's China market dominance in order to help OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI. China shouldn't be buying H20s. Those are gimped 3 year old GPUs. If Nvidia is allowed to sell the latest and greatest in China, I think their revenue would jump massively.
- MonkeyClub 1y agoThis conveniently coincides with China banning purchases of Nvidia AI chips: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45275070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45275070
- rich_sasha 1y agoCan someone ELI5 this to me? Nvidia has the market cap of a medium-sized country precisely because apparently (?) no one else can make chips like them. Great tech, hard to manufacture, etc - Intel and AMD are nowhere to be seen. And I can imagine it's very tricky business! China, admittedly full of smart and hard working people, then just wakes up one day an in a few years covers the entire gap, to within some small error? How is this consistent? Either: - The Chinese GPUs are not that good after all - Nvidia doesn't have any magical secret sauce, and China could easily catch up - Nvidia IP is real but Chinese people are so smart they can overcome decades of R&D advantage in just s few years - It's all stolen IP To be clear, my default guess isn't that it is stolen IP, rather I can't make sense of it. NVDA is valued near infinity, then China just turns around and produces their flagship product without too much sweat..?
- rsynnott 1y ago> because apparently (?) no one else can make chips like them No, that's not really why. It is because nobody else has their _ecosystem_; they have a lot of soft lock-in. This isn’t just an nvidia thing. Why was Intel so dominant for decades? Largely not due to secret magic technology, but due to _ecosystem_. A PPC601 was substantially faster than a pentium, but of little use to you if your whole ecosystem was x86, say. Now nvidia’s ecosystem advantage isn’t as strong as Intel’s was, but it’s not nothing, either. (Eventually, even Intel itself was unable to deal with this; Itanium failed miserably, largely due not to external competition but due to competition with the x86, though it did have other issues.) It’s also notable that nvidia’s adventures in markets where someone _else_ has the ecosystem advantage have been less successful. In particular, see their attempts to break into mobile chip land; realistically, it was easier for most OEMs just to use Qualcomm.
- robotnikman 1y ago>In particular, see their attempts to break into mobile chip land; I wouldn't exactly say it was a failure, all those chips ended up being used in the Nintendo Switch
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- tw1984 1y agoSeveral years ago, whenever some Chinese engineers dared to propose using some Chinese parts, the challenges he/she had to face is always "who is going to be responsible if it is not reliable enough for its quality?" Nowadays, whenever some Chinese engineers dared to propose using some American parts, the challenges he/she had to face is always "who is going to be responsible if it is not reliable enough for its supply?"
- h1fra 1y agoIf CUDA is nvidia's moat, which has basically created a monopoly, how long until there is an anti-monopoly trial against them in EU or even in the US?
- neworder56 1y agoConsidering the fact China controls most of the world supply of rare minerals, considering the fact the US is lead by a incompetent leader, considering the fact Nvidia looses a big market, I think China can compete with even the leading Nvidia chips in a couple of years time. If that happens, China in turn can export those Chips to countries that are in dire need of Chips, like Russia. They can export to Africa, South-America and the rest of Asia. Thus resulting in more competition for Nvidia. I see bright times ahead, where the USA no longer controls all of the worlds chip supply and OS systems. I see this as an absolute win.
- Citizen_Lame 1y agoChina doesn't control the supply of rare minerals but rather production. Rare minerals are not really rare, but the processing them is a "dirty" business and does lot of damage to environment. China has managed to monopolise the production (cheap prices) and advance the refinement process, so other domestic projects to extract rare earth minerals were not really profitable. To start it again would take some time.
- eagerpace 1y agoWhy do we look at these as a race? There is nothing to win. Nobody won space, or nukes, and they won’t win AI. You might get there first, but your competitor will get there soon after regardless. Embrace it.
- TechSquidTV 1y agoWe win. The companies think they'll "win", and I'm fine letting them. The race is good for us.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xorcist 1y agoThere is no us and them! But them, they do not think the same.
- CamperBob2 1y agoHuh? Things would certainly have turned out very differently if Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan had won the nuke race.
- byyoung3 1y agoisnt the h20 nerfed anyways? H20’s FP16/BF16 performance is reduced to ~148 TFLOPS vs ~1,979 TFLOPS for the H100?
- gok 1y agotldr it's somewhat comparable to an A100, which was released in May 2020.
- techlatest_net 1y ago[dead]
- seatac76 1y agoSo about 5 years behind the cutting edge, SMIC showed their advanced lithography tools today(still no ASML) but come 2030 at this rate? Hard to say they won’t catch up.
- buyucu 1y agoThe A100 gpu is almost 5 years old at this point, and still useful for a lot of things.
- boggio 1y agoWhile their lithography may lag, their system-level engineering is leveraging unique strengths. China's lack of power constraints allows them to build massive, optically-networked systems like the CloudMatrix 384. There is a SemiAnalysis that compares it to Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72. It looks like they overcome weaker individual chips to outperform Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 with 2x the compute, 3.6x the aggregate memory, and 2.1x the memory bandwidth. with scale-out networking and software optimization, not just silicon.
- reilly3000 1y agoFor a comparison, the latest Nvidia Blackwell cards have up to 8tb/sec memory bandwidth vs 700GB/sec here.
- _zoltan_ 1y agofunny that you didn't capitalize TB properly but did GB. :) anyway. VR200 supposedly has 20TB/s HBM, so I wish good luck to all these copy cats to catch up.
- marshyj 1y agoIf China is ok spending a few years catching up on chips then they must not think that "AGI" or a serious takeoff of AI is near.
- kamikazeturtles 1y agoDoes any normal person think "AGI" is real? I thought that was just the marketing strategy execs employed to get regulatory capture and convince all the AGI pilled researchers to work for them
- yatopifo 1y agoThey seem to be highly pragmatic. Rather than chasing AGI, they are more interested in what can be done with today's technology. Any breakthrough towards AGI will inevitably leak quickly, so they'll be able to catch up as long as the foundation is ready. In a bicycle race, it can be quite beneficial to travel behind the leader and enjoy a reduction in drag forces. Perhaps that's their guiding principle.
- zer00eyz 1y agoThis article is propaganda. If you have the most basic understanding of chips its not just design, as that has a high degree of coupling to manufacturing and this article doesn't say where, who or how the chips are being made. China, at last check was behind Intels home grown chip making efforts when it came to sizes and yields. Hype and saber rattling to get the US to (Re)act, or possibly ignore the growing black market for Nvidia gear (that also happens to be bi-directional with modified cards flowing back to the US).
- olaulaja 1y agoNot a word on compute or interconnect speeds. All this really says is they stuck some HBM on a chip.
- g42gregory 1y agoSo faced with a choice of buying hobbled H20 GPU chips vs developing their own (so far behind the SOTA), the Chinese market decided to develop/buy their own GPU chips? Who could have possibly seen this coming? /s
- tonyhart7 1y agoif the card is legit and china can scale it to millions then its just matter of time when SOTA model is produced from china first or not
- buyucu 1y agoI hope China floods the world with cheap, affordable GPUs. We’re sick and tired of the Nvidia tax.
- Sportnik 1y agoThis is typical CCP propaganda. If Alibaba truly had a chip that was remotely comparable to the H20, they wouldn’t need to ban the H20.
- userbinator 1y agoI am hoping they release it as a fully open-source design, or with as much documentation and openness as they can.