NVIDIA's H800 AI GPU was rolled out last year to appease the Sanction Gods—but later on, the US Government deemed the cutdown "Hopper" part to be far too potent for Team Green's Chinese enterprise customers. Last October, newly amended export conditions banned sales of the H800, as well as the slightly older (plus similarly gimped) A800 "Ampere" GPU in the region. NVIDIA's engineering team returned to the drawing board, and developed a new range of compliantly weakened products. An exclusive Reuters report suggests that Team Green is taking pre-orders for a refreshed "Hopper" GPU—the latest China-specific flagship is called "HGX H20." NVIDIA web presences have not been updated with this new model, as well as Ada Lovelace-based L20 PCIe and L2 PCIe GPUs. Huawei's competing Ascend 910B is said to be slightly more performant in "some areas"—when compared to the H20—according to insiders within the distribution network.

The leakers reckon that NVIDIA's mainland distributors will be selling H20 models within a price range of $12,000 - $15,000—Huawei's locally developed Ascend 910B is priced at 120,000 RMB (~$16,900). One Reuters source stated that: "some distributors have started advertising the (NVIDIA H20) chips with a significant markup to the lower end of that range at about 110,000 yuan ($15,320). The report suggests that NVIDIA refused to comment on this situation. Another insider claimed that: "distributors are offering H20 servers, which are pre-configured with eight of the AI chips, for 1.4 million yuan. By comparison, servers that used eight of the H800 chips were sold at around 2 million yuan when they were launched a year ago." Small batches of H20 products are expected to reach important clients within the first quarter of 2024, followed by a wider release in Q2. It is believed that mass production will begin around Spring time.NVIDIA enjoyed 90% AI GPU market dominance last year, but many "domestic" rivals have emerged with competing solutions that (naturally) escape international trade restrictions. Reuters tracked down an anonymous technical expert, with alleged intimate knowledge of performance data: "Huawei's 910B chip is widely considered (to be) the most competitive AI offering now available within China and has become more popular amid concern that buyers could be faced with further restricted access to NVIDIA's products resulting from U.S. sanctions...In terms of specifications, one example of where the H20 appears to lag the 910B in its FP32 performance—a critical metric that measures how quickly a chip can process common tasks and which is rated at less than half of its rival's capability...However, the H20 appears to have an advantage over the 910B in terms of interconnect speed, which measures how quickly data can transfer between chips...That means the H20 remains competitive with the 910B in applications that require linking a large number of chips together to work as a system, he said."