Nvidia restarting production for H200 chips for sales in China
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, speaking to reporters on Tuesday. Photo: Ina Fried/Axios
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company is in the process of restarting manufacturing of its H200 chips for shipments to China.
Why it matters: Nvidia is eager to re-enter the crucial Chinese market, but its efforts have been hampered by U.S. export restrictions and Beijing's push to build a domestic chip industry.
Driving the news: "We've been licensed for many customers in China for H200," Huang said, speaking to reporters at the company's GTC event in San Jose, California. "We have received purchase orders from many customers, and we're in the process of restarting our manufacturing."
Catch up quick: Nvidia in late February said that small amounts of H200 products for China-based customers had been approved by the U.S. government, but that it did not know whether any imports will be allowed into China.
- Beijing has to approve any sales into the country, and has been pressing domestic companies to use Chinese-made chip — part of an effort to boost the domestic industry led by Huawei Technologies.
- The H200, though from Nvidia's previous generation of products, is a more powerful chip than anything offered in the country.
Scaring with 'science fiction'
Huang also cautioned that some in the tech world are "scaring everybody about a science fiction version of AI," something he said strikes him as arrogant.
- His comment comes after Anthropic drew red lines around U.S. government use of AI, specifically around fully autonomous warfare and for mass surveillance of Americans.
Zoom in: Asked by Axios if there are places that AI shouldn't go, Huang responded that there are a lot more places that the technology needs to go, including protecting against cyber attacks.
- "We have to just continuously learn and be a little bit more humble about what we know and don't know," Huang said. "Scaring everybody about a science fiction version of AI is a little bit too arrogant."
- "Warning people is one thing," he said. "Scaring people is a completely different thing."
The big picture: Huang has used the event to tout not just Nvidia's range of new chips and technologies, but also the giant potential for the market. On Monday, Huang forecast that Nvidia will generate more than $1 trillion in revenue by 2027 from its mainstay AI chips.
- On Tuesday, Huang told reporters that his prediction of $1 trillion in revenue by 2027 only reflects sales of Blackwell and Rubin systems and suggests there is plenty of upside from other products, including CPU-only systems and storage.
