Following the revelation on September 1 that the US are restricting Nvidia's and AMD's AI GPUs to China, Nvidia has followed up with an update that the US government has already greenlighted the export of A100 GPUs to China. The license will remain effective until March 1, 2023. Regarding H100, Nvidia stated that "the US government has authorized exports, re-exports and in-country transfer needed to continue Nvidia's development of H100 integrated circuits." While the Chinese high-tech industry might have been temporarily allowed to catch a short breath, alarm has been sounded over the long-term prospect of its GPU sector. The latest restrictions placed on GPU import could be a continuation of the US' earlier effort to strike China's HPC industry.
Back in 2015, the supercomputers developed by China's National Defense Technology University, Tianhe 1 and Tianhe 2, already drew the attention of the US government. Fearing their applications on nuclear weapon research, the US Department of Commerce placed China's National Supercomputing Center, where the two supercomputers were operated, to the Entity List. Targeted were the National Supercomputing Center's branches in Changsha, Guanzhou (hosting Tianhe-2) and Tianjian (hosting Tianhe-1). Among the affected companies was Intel, which was consequently barred from shipping its Xeon processors for Tianhe 2's upgrade. In 2019 and 2021, the US continued to target several Chinese entities involved in supercomputing, including other branches of the National Supercomputing Center. The latest restrictions appeared to prevent Chinese Internet companies from engaging in HPC. While Nvidia and AMD could offer customized, non-FP64 capable GPUs to the Chinese market, working their way around the ban, but they would still have to face cost challenges and clear inventories. Taiwanese and Chinese suppliers of datacenter-related peripheral products, such as baseboard management controllers and power management ICs, would feel the repercussions as well.
The US restrictions have also drawn attention to China's GPU industry landscape. While Nvidia and AMD are undisputed leaders in the global market, China's GPU industry landscape has seen some fresh faces in recent years trying to catch up with global giants. Notable among them include Moore Threads and Biren Technology, both from former Nvidia employees. Moore Thread was founded by Nvidia's former global VP and general manager in China, Zhang Jianzhong, in 2020, and independently developed its own GPU architecture MUSA (Moore Threads Unified System Architecture) used on its desktop-oriented MYS60 and server-oriented MTT S2000 GPUs that were announced this year. Crunchbase indicates that the startup has raised a total of US$313 million over two rounds, with ByteDance and Tencent among its investors. Similarly, Biren Technology was founded by a senior Nvidia GPU architect, Lingjie Xu, in 2019. The startup has raised US$285 million over three rounds, and In August it announced its first product, BR100 GPU, claiming to outperform Nvidia A100 in several domains from computer vision to natural language processing.
Interestingly, China's first GPU company, Jingjia Microelectronics, started out to serve the defense industry, and is the only publicly listed GPU company in China. Founded in 2016, the company sought to replace the ATI M9 GPUs used in Chinese military aircraft, and successfully developed its JM5400 GPU in 2014. The success laid the foundation to Jingjia Micro's dominance in the Chinese military aircraft GPU market. In 2018, China's main semiconductor policy fund, National IC Industry Fund, became its second largest shareholder. Also in the same year, Jingjia Micro started to shift its focus onto the commercial market, launching its JM7200 GPU for niche commercial applications. A later version, JM7201, was launched for desktop applications. In 2021, Jingjia Micro was included in the Entity List, and in 2022 it launched two versions of its highly-anticipated JM9 family of GPUs, but their performances have received mixed reviews.
Article translated by Misha Lu
