- Nvidia Showcases Its Upcoming Vera Processors to Chinese Customers While Announcing Availability Soon
- The arrival of data center processors pits Nvidia against traditional rivals Intel and AMD, which currently control most of the market in China and other regions.
- Nvidia’s move comes at a time when the Chinese government continues to advocate for homegrown chip solutions, and U.S. controls on chips have effectively reduced their share to 0% of China’s lucrative data center market.
Nvidia is apparently working to win Chinese customers for what its CEO sees as the next multibillion-dollar frontier for the company: data center processors.
The company has spent the past two years eyeing the world’s second-largest chip market, effectively suppressing it with a mix of consumer chips and homegrown solutions such as Huawei’s Ascend offerings, backed by the Chinese government’s push for self-reliance.
While Chinese authorities are holding the line with soft barriers – no official restrictions on Nvidia’s chip exports to China exist on the continent – Nvidia is apparently betting on a reset of relations when it comes to its Vera data center processors.
Why CPUs and why now for Nvidia?
Nvidia’s Vera processor is more than just a competitor in the market. It threatens to upend the existing status quo, with Intel and AMD chips dominating the market, by adopting an AI-driven design approach.
Nvidia touts Vera as up to 1.8x faster than current x86 processors from Intel and AMD in certain workloads, offers 4x the memory bandwidth, and delivers up to a 50% performance increase over traditional rack-scale processors.
According to a PK Press Club report, at least one large, unnamed Chinese cloud computing company intends to purchase 300 servers, each containing 2 Vera processors. The processors themselves are estimated to cost upwards of $20,000 before the bulk discounts take effect.
However, it remains to be seen whether this will result in an order. Chinese regulators appear to be making a stronger push for self-sufficiency in their chip sector, prompting many of its startups and AI giants to opt for local chip options, such as Huawei’s Ascend and T-Head’s Hanguang.
Nvidia’s salvation could come from an unexpected place, however, as the battle lines could be different this time around: The same AI export controls that crushed its Chinese business could now work in its favor.
Not only are processors significantly less regulated by US export rules, but the Chinese market is also reeling from pressure on server processors, with Intel pushing delivery times up to 6 months in some cases, although AMD noted that the processor market remains tight, with demand outstripping supply.
If Nvidia can overcome the policy and software advantage of the incumbent x86 architecture, as well as the ecosystem built around it, it could carve out a significant share of China’s lucrative data center market, even without the “rigidity” of CUDA that makes its GPUs so sought-after in this segment.
It remains to be seen whether this will be enough to overturn the clear advantage that the two well-placed chipmakers (Intel and AMD) have in terms of ecosystem, as well as the advantage that the national champion, Huawei, enjoys in terms of support at the government level.
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