Nvidia’s next AI accelerator for the Chinese market, following the recent ban on its HGX H20 offerings, will not be based on the Hopper architecture, reports Reuters citing a Taiwanese TV news stream featuring Jensen Huang. Moreover, according to insider scoops obtained by Nikkei Asia, Nvidia is moving from HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), to a GDDR7 based design, although the specific architecture is still up in the air.
The U.S. government effectively banned the export of Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s Instinct MI308 AI chips to China last month, requiring a license with a presumption of denial. After the $5.5 billion loss Nvidia incurred following this change, reports pointed towards a further cut-down H20 variant.
Nvidia’s top-end H100 and H200 accelerators were banned from export to China even before they were launched. To mitigate these regulations, Nvidia introduced the H800 in March 2023, which too was eventually barred from export in October of the same year. Since then, the H20 has been Nvidia’s most advanced offering for the Chinese market in the interim, until its recent export prohibition last month.
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When questioned about the follow-up to the H20, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang replied, “It’s not Hopper because it’s not possible to modify Hopper anymore.” The U.S. Government cited the H20’s memory bandwidth and interconnect bandwidth for its potential use in Chinese supercomputers, so it would stand to reason that Nvidia would further cut down the memory subsystem.