Nvidia Reportedly Prepares Mass Production Of Cheaper China-Centric Blackwell AI Chip

dailyblitz.de 4 hours ago

Nvidia’s market share in China has cratered from 95% to 50% over the past four years, driven by the Biden administration’s super-aggressive chip export restrictions. The restrictions opened the door for Chinese rival Huawei to seize market share quickly with its Ascend 910B chip.

According to Reuters, Nvidia is preparing to launch a new lower-spec AI chip based on a Blackwell architecture design to comply with U.S. regulations and reclaim lost market share in the world’s second-largest economy.

Those sources say Nvidia’s new chip will be priced significantly lower than its recently restricted H20 chip. Those familiar with the production timeline say series production is set for next month.

The new chip, expected to begin mass production in June, stays within Washington’s 1.7–1.8 TB/s memory bandwidth cap using GDDR7 memory, compared to the H20’s 4 TB/s. The sources say a second China-specific Blackwell GPU will be released around September.

Sources provided more color on pricing and chip specs:

The GPU or graphics processing unit will be part of Nvidia’s latest generation Blackwell-architecture AI processors and is expected to be priced between $6,500 and $8,000, well below the $10,000-$12,000 the H20 sold for, according to two of the sources.

. . .

It will be based on Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D, a server-class graphics processor and will use conventional GDDR7 memory instead of more advanced high bandwidth memory, the two sources said.

They added it would not use Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, opens new tab advanced Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) packaging technology.

In recent weeks, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang secured multi-billion-dollar AI chip deals in Saudi Arabia after President Trump rolled back chip restrictions.