The world’s most valuable chipmaker is far from giving up its desire to retain China as a key growth market. According to a report, Nvidia is developing a new AI chip specifically for sale in China. This chip, codenamed B30A, is designed to be half as powerful as its flagship B300 Blackwell GPU.
The new B30A would be more powerful than the H20 GPUs the company is currently allowed to sell to China. Its design will be single-die in nature, unlike the dual-die design used in the more powerful B300 GPUs. The B30A would still retain similar features to the H20, including fast data transmission, support for NVLink, and high-bandwidth memory.
This development of the B30A appears to be separate from another chip the company is said to be developing for the Chinese market. In an emailed statement, Nvidia said it evaluates a variety of products for its roadmap to be prepared to compete to the extent that governments allow. The company stated that everything it offers has full approval from the applicable authorities and is designed solely for beneficial commercial use.
This news arrives as the current administration has recently relaxed its stance on letting chipmakers export high-performance AI chips to China. However, approvals for this new chip are not considered certain.
As geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington are increasingly affected by the race to develop AI, critics argue that the US must maintain its lead by controlling the supply of necessary technology to China. But Nvidia and its peers maintain that ceding the valuable market of China to rivals like Huawei would be tantamount to giving up entirely. They find themselves in a position of selling the essential tools during a technological gold rush.