Global Courant 2023-05-30 22:43:33
Nvidia, a California-based maker of graphics processing units, is to build a world-class artificial intelligence research center in Taiwan to accelerate its Omniverse project, a computing platform that supports 3D applications.
The announcement was made after the share price of the US company rose 24.6% in one day on May 24 to US$380.6. On Tuesday, Nvidia’s valuation hit $1 trillion, making it the first US chipmaker to join the trillion-dollar club.
This quickly earned Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang the nickname “One-trillion man” in Taiwan, on top of his famed status as the “godfather of AI”.
Shares of Nvidia were down 50.3% to $146.14 late last year from $291.11 a year earlier as the US continued to tighten exports of high-end chips to China. Last August, the US government banned Nvidia from selling its A100 and H100 chips to China and Russia.
Shares are up 166% year-to-date as the company pledged to invest in AI technology.
Nvidia will hire 1,000 people and invest up to TWD24.3 billion (US$790 million) in its new AI research center, or AI University, which will be jointly managed by National Taiwan University. It has secured a grant of TWD 6.7 billion from the Taiwanese government for this project.
Chip war takes its toll
Meanwhile, Huang told the Financial Times that further escalation of the chip war between China and the US would do massive damage to US companies.
He said China will make more semiconductors of its own if it can’t buy them from US companies. He said U.S. lawmakers need to be careful when regulating or they will hurt the tech sector.
Hung too told a global media roundtable at the Computex Taipei industry expo on Tuesday that existing chip makers must continue to work hard to remain competitive and not underestimate China’s ability to catch up in the industry.
He said China will cultivate its own chip companies amid the US sanctions, which is why many GPU startups have sprung up in the country.
Currently, the major Chinese GPU and AI chip makers are MetaX, Birentech, Enflame, and Horizon. Many of these companies outsource their chip production to overseas foundries, such as Taiwan’s TSMC.
Last October, media reports reported that Washington asked TSMC not to produce high-end chips for Birentech after the Shanghai-based company claimed its BR100, a 7-nanometer GPU chip, is faster than the A100 in AI processing.
Chinese markets
In August 2022, Nvidia’s A100 and H100 chips were added to a US export control list when the government said the products could be routed to or used by a “military end-use” or “military end-user” in China and Russia. Nvidia was also banned from shipping its DGX, an AI server, to China if a unit contained one of the two chips.
Nvidia’s DGX system. Photo: Nvidia
At the same time, the US government also restricted sales of AMD’s MI250 Accelerator AI chip to China.
Last November, Nvidia said it would move its regional warehouse from Hong Kong to Taipei. It also introduced the A800 to the Chinese market, which is similar to the A100 but runs at 400 gigabytes per second, while the A100 runs at 600 gigabytes per second. Because of this difference, the A800 satisfies the export requirements of the US government.
Nvidia holds a 60-70% share of the global GPU market, while some cloud service providers, who develop application-specific chips for integrated circuits, hold more than 20% of the market, according to TrendForcea Taiwan-based industry data provider.
Nvidia will be able to maintain its market dominance with strong demand for its A100 in the US and A800 in China, as well as growing demand due to the development of chatbots and AI computations, TrendForce analysts said. Globally, GPU chip shipments will grow 46% year-over-year in 2023, she added.
Currently, Nvidia can still sell or ship high-performance computer hardware to China by obtaining a special export license. However, it remains possible that one day Nvidia will no longer be allowed to sell its A800 to the country.
Anton Shilov, columnist at Tom’s Hardware, wrote in March that Nvidia will lose out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue if it can’t get licenses to sell the A800 and other products to Huawei and Inspur. He said it will not be easy for the company to replace these two Chinese customers with others.
His comments came after Inspur, the world’s third-largest server maker, was added to the US Department of Commerce’s “entity list” in early March this year. Huawei has been on the list since 2019.
Two-year preparation
Nvidia has spent two years preparing to launch its Taiwanese AI project, which will help Taiwan nurture AI talents and provide a platform for academic use. said the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The project will be implemented within the five years ending March 2027, it said.
Separately, the company said Monday that it will build an AI cloud supercomputer in Israel for several hundred million dollars. The facility, backed by 800 technology startups and tens of thousands of software engineers, is expected to become operational by the end of this year.
In two hours speech at Computex Taipei 2023 on Monday, Huang told an audience of 3,500 about Nvidia’s AI development plan.
He said Taiwanese electronics makers can use Nvidia’s Omniverse, Isaac Sim and Metropolis to build virtual factories, simulate robots and perform automated inspections, respectively. He also showed how AI technology can be applied in online games, content generation and music production.
Read: China leads US in technology that matters most: report
Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3
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