Since last year, due to the downward trend of the global chip situation and the impact of chip restrictions in the United States, the performance of American chip giants such as Qualcomm and Intel has declined sharply. However, Nvidia is an exception, with revenue and profits soaring year-on-year.
In fact, the mainland market business of U.S. chip companies has suffered huge losses, while Nvidia's strong growth performance has offset the negative impact due to the continued popularity of global artificial intelligence. But Nvidia has not given up and has recently started to act!
Recently, Nvidia announced its financial report for the fourth fiscal quarter, with revenue soaring 265% year-on-year and 22% quarter-on-quarter, and net profit soaring 769% year-on-year and 33% quarter-on-quarter. The point is that it has broken the all-time record for three consecutive quarters.
However, due to the continuous escalation of export control rules by the United States, NVIDIA's income from the mainland has been greatly affected. Previously, the mainland's data center business accounted for 20%-25% of revenue, but now it has fallen to a single-digit percentage.
However, Nvidia does not want to give up the mainland market and has been trying to provide unrestricted alternatives to Chinese companies.
Previously, A100 and H100 were restricted from shipment by the United States, and Nvidia modified them and launched a special version of the mainland chip A800 and H800 that met the export rules, but it didn't take long for them to be restricted from shipment by the United States.
As a result, Nvidia said that it would continue to revise and launch three chip products that comply with the U.S. export control policy.
But before the product was launched, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Raimondo threatened that if Nvidia operated like this, they would take action to restrict it the next day. This directly forced CEO Jensen Huang to be anxious, and bluntly said that the US side should give definite rules.
Later, the United States could only change its tune and allow Nvidia to continue to ship chips to Chinese companies, but high-end chips are still restricted. Although the American side is less demanding on Nvidia, castrated chips are no longer popular.
Because the emasculated H20 chip computing power is only less than 15% of that of H100, it can no longer meet the needs of our AI manufacturers. Alibaba, Tencent and others are shifting orders to local AI chip companies, while accelerating internal chip research and development.
Among them, Huawei's Ascend series of artificial intelligence chips are very popular, and mainland manufacturers have begun to purchase more.
It is worth mentioning that last year, iFLYTEK directly stated that they have achieved good results by using the Ascend series of artificial intelligence chips, and the computing power it has achieved can already be compared with NVIDIA A100, which shows the strength of Huawei's AI chips.
Of course, this also caught Huang's attention, and in an interview he praised Huawei as a "very good company"!
This is not counting, in the documents provided to the United States recently, Nvidia listed Huawei as the number one competitor for the first time in many categories such as artificial intelligence AI chips. This deserves our attention, and NVIDIA's move has a certain purpose!
On the one hand, this is NVIDIA's high recognition of Huawei's AI chips. Nvidia's market share now exceeds 70%, and it has an absolute position in the field of AI chips. Being recognized by it shows that Huawei does have strength.
But on the other hand, even Nvidia regards Huawei as its number one competitor, which seems to be attracting more attention from the United States. In other words, Nvidia is clearly reminding the United States that Huawei is also very strong in AI chips.
In this case, the US side will probably be more cautious and will not relax the sanctions, and may continue to increase the intensity of sanctions.
In this regard, some foreign media directly said that Nvidia is starting to fight back! This "counterattack" has two meanings, one is a counterattack to the United States that continues to increase chip restrictions, pointing out that the United States restricts its shipments, and the mainland still has leading AI chips.
Through this move, Nvidia intends to allow the United States to relax restrictions on it, because restrictions will only make them lose more.
If the United States does not relax its restrictions on Nvidia, then it should increase sanctions against mainland AI chip companies, so that Nvidia's competitors will not develop so fast.
After all, the world's largest semiconductor market is in the mainland, and at present, NVIDIA's high-end AI series chips can no longer be shipped to Chinese enterprises, which is equivalent to giving up a large part of the market in vain.
However, NVIDIA's careful thinking may be difficult to achieve, because Huawei's ability to realize the return of its self-developed Kirin chip shows that the chip manufacturing problem has been basically solved, so it is not a problem to develop AI chips!
As a result, NVIDIA can only be restricted by the United States, and has to give up a large number of markets, watching the rise of Chinese enterprise AI!