Not at all surprising. It doesn’t matter what Huang says, this would have happened if there were no restrictions on Nvidia/AMD enterprise GPUs sales to China.
I mean yeah, GN did a whole movie on how easily available they are still, both for purchase or modding them to fit your needs. Link below. But yeah, this is pretty normal for China to try and keep cash flow within country. They wouldn’t limit themselves if they hadn’t caught up, but if they have now then it makes sense to try and stop cash flowing out by restricting to their version. Do it with apps and plenty of other things so it’s nothing new. Literally irrelevant that it’s export banned from the US.
Note: it is 3 hours… but it’s not a bad watch if you haven’t seen it and are interested.
I wonder if this is blowback from the Gamers Nexus investigation?
I highly doubt GN has any role in shaping the CCP’s policies. The CCP likely already knew the facts behind the investigation (I haven’t seen the video, just read summaries).
I guarantee you the CCP were ahead of GN which is why they didnt care about the video.
Why would the CCP care negatively even if they didn’t have the details and learned of this for the first time from the GN video?
Beijing claims its homegrown AI processors now match H20 and RTX Pro 6000D
So do they? Last I heard (which was not that recently) they were still notably behind in performance and I’m surprised if they were able to catch up that quickly?
The TH article doesn’t really discuss the performance claim.
In my limited understanding, they do not. I get the impression performance claims in this area tend to be very PR-heavy with limited independent validation.
Try finding independent benchmarks for Huawei Ascend 910. This GPU is claimed to be at 60% performance of the Nvidia H100 (last generation starting enterprise GPU compute SKU).
That being said, I don’t speak Chinese.
They did, but you’re not understanding what’s being said. The H20 is a crippled chip that NVIDIA made for the Chinese market because of US sanctions. This chip is about 50% slower than NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell B200 chip. China is saying the caught up to the crippled version. Which is true, they have not however caught up to the latest and greatest. They haven’t even caught up to the non-crippled version the H100 which the poster below mentions.
Do you have a source for english language benchmarks for the H20 versus say Huawei Ascend 910 (or honestly any latest Chinese compute GPU)? I am genuinely curious, independent benchmarks (at least in English) seem difficult to find. Searches in other languages that I do know lead to the same PR statements that are available in English.
I have done foreign language desk research (high level stuff, mostly looking for very specific things), but that was for a big paid project where we needed the data and I am not that interested in this topic. 😀
Here’s an article about what I am saying. I don’t think there are benchmarks though.
The impression I get (not a professional in this area, so maybe I don’t know what I am talking about) is that this a pure brute force approach for gaining performance at the rack system level.
It would be interesting to see direct benchmarks for H20 verses Ascend 910C across the different precision formats.
It’s actually funny that you’re asking that. This is exactly Huawei’s solution.
https://semianalysis.com/2025/04/16/huawei-ai-cloudmatrix-384-chinas-answer-to-nvidia-gb200-nvl72/
Thank you! Will need to read it in more depth.
Ultimately what I would take from all of this is on hardware China is close. Not at NVIDIA chips yet, but without software optimization, it doesn’t matter how close the hardware is. Imo what China is doing right now is to force a criticality in number of users to find bugs and optimize the software. It’s literally the only way they can catch up. What’s hilarious is Lutnick literally told them this.
And to prove my point, just look at MooreThread S80. When it first released it had the hardware but ran so poorly it ran like a GTX1030. But with software optimization, it could run wukong at 48fps at 4k. Without the users, China can’t improve. So now they’re forcing people to be users.
