TrendForce said that the US government is expected to allow NVIDIA to resume the sale of H20 GPUs in the Chinese market. The policy shift will help drive the demand recovery of local AI and cloud operators. H20 will become the main force of high-level AI chips again, and drive the demand for HBM increases simultaneously.
In April, the United States strengthened restrictions on exports of high-level AI chips, resulting in a reduction in the estimated annual shipment volume of H20 specifically developed for the Chinese market. According to the latest situation, NVIDIA may slam the original delivery target, and TrendForce will increase the proportion of NVIDIA, AMD and other chips purchased from China's AI market to 49%, and the valuation of the export ban was about 42%.
Although Hua is an industry-leading AI chip for other industry players, the overall supply chain will still be difficult to completely replace the NVIDIA system's soft integration, computing efficiency and supply chain advantages in the short term. The recovery of H20 supply can effectively address the needs of China's AI application side, especially large CSPs are the first to build their own data center basic facilities. NVIDIA will also promote the RTX PRO 6000 special edition to supplement edge AI reasoning and other diverse applications.
From the perspective of HBM, the shipping H20 in 2024 will mainly be equipped with HBM3 8hi. At the beginning of this year, NIVIDIA will be gradually upgraded to the HBM3e 8hi, while increasing the total capacity. Currently, China's self-developed ASIC is subject to HBM shipment ban. Most of the products use HBM2e purchased before. H20 will be relatively affected and its proportion of HBM consumption will also increase.
TrendForce analyzed that the development of China's AI market faces political factors, and there is still a certain degree of uncertainty for NVIDIA. When H20 exports are lifted, local end customers such as CSP and OEM will accumulate as much inventory as possible, and AI business and ecological systems will develop rapidly simultaneously with government support.