NVIDIA could be adjusting its enterprise-grade GPU production strategies for the Chinese market, according to an article published by MyDriver—despite major sanctions placed on semiconductor imports, Team Green is doing plenty of business with tech firms operating in the region thanks to an uptick in AI-related activities. NVIDIA offers two market specific accelerator models that have been cut down to conform to rules and regulations—the more powerful and expensive (250K RMB/~$35K) H800 is an adaptation of the western H100 GPU, while the A800 is a legal market alternative to the older A100.

The report proposes that NVIDIA is considering plans to reduce factory output of the A800 (sold for 100K RMB/~$14K per unit), so clients will be semi-forced into purchasing the higher-end H800 model instead (if they require a significant number of GPUs). The A800 seems to be the more popular choice for the majority of companies at the moment, with the heavy hitters—Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Jitwei and ByteDance—flexing their spending muscles and splurging on mixed shipments of the two accelerators. By limiting supplies of the lesser A800, Team Green could be generating more profit by prioritizing the more expensive (and readily available) model.

TikTok developer ByteDance, and other major Chinese tech firms including Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu are reported (by local media) to be snapping up lots of NVIDIA HPC GPUs, with even more orders placed this year. ByteDance is alleged to have spent enough on new products in 2023 to match the expenditure of the entire Chinese tech market on similar NVIDIA purchases for FY2022. According to news publication Jitwei, ByteDance has placed orders totaling $1 billion so far this year with Team Green—the report suggests that a mix of A100 and H800 GPU shipments have been sent to the company's mainland data centers.

The older Ampere-based A100 units were likely ordered prior to trade sanctions enforced on China post-August 2022, with further wiggle room allowed—meaning that shipments continued until September. The H800 GPU is a cut-down variant of 2022's flagship "Hopper" H100 model, designed specifically for the Chinese enterprise market—with reduced performance in order to meet export restriction standards. The H800 costs around $10,000 (average sale price per accelerator) according to Tom's Hardware, so it must offer some level of potency at that price. ByteDance has ordered roughly 100,000 units—with an unspecified split between H800 and A100 stock. Despite the development of competing HPC products within China, it seems that the nation's top-flight technology companies are heading directly to NVIDIA to acquire the best-of-the-best and highly mature AI processing hardware.

NVIDIA's H100 accelerator is one of the most powerful solutions for powering AI workloads. And, of course, every company and government wants to use it to power its AI workload. However, in countries like China, shipment of US-made goods is challenging. With export regulations in place, NVIDIA had to get creative and make a specific version of its H100 GPU for the Chinese market, labeled the H800 model. Late last year, NVIDIA also created a China-specific version of the A100 model called A800, with the only difference being the chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth being dropped from 600 GB/s to 400 GB/s.

This year's H800 SKU also features similar restrictions, and the company appears to have made similar sacrifices for shipping its chips to China. From the 600 GB/s bandwidth of the regular H100 PCIe model, the H800 is gutted to only 300 GB/s of bi-directional chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth speed. While we have no data if the CUDA or Tensor core count has been adjusted, the sacrifice of bandwidth to comply with export regulations will have consequences. As the communication speed is reduced, training large models will increase the latency and slow the workload compared to the regular H100 chip. This is due to the massive data size that needs to travel from one chip to another. According to Reuters, an NVIDIA spokesperson declined to discuss other differences, stating that "our 800 series products are fully compliant with export control regulations."