Nvidia's Win in China: Major Cloud Players ByteDance and Alibaba Want Nvidia's Chips Courtesy ChatGPT Wave

Nvidia Corp NVDA bagged significant orders from major Chinese internet companies with cloud computing businesses following the 2023 Spring Festival.

The chipmaker won orders over $1 billion in GPUs ByteDance Ltd in 2023, Pandaily reports.

ByteDance has received 100,000 A100 and H800 accelerator cards, including delivered and pending orders thus far. Notably, the H800 only began production in March 2023.

Reportedly, the orders from ByteDance alone in 2023 might reach the total number of commercial GPUs Nvidia sold in China in 2022.

In June 2020, after the release of GPT-3, ByteDance failed to see its commercial potential due to its average generation capabilities.

Alibaba Group Holding Limited BABA also actively purchased GPUs in 2018-2019, with its purchase volume reaching at least tens of thousands of units. Alibaba sent nearly one-tenth of these to the Damo Academy for AI technology research, serving the trillion-parameter large model M6 released in 2021.

Significant companies like ByteDance and Alibaba mainly negotiate purchases directly with Nvidia. The distributors and the secondary market failed to keep up with Chinese demand. Nvidia, however, offers specific discounts based on the purchase scale.

The current price of an A100 on Nvidia’s official website is $10,000, while an H100 costs $36,000. The A800 and H800 models, launched in the Chinese market in 2022, are slightly cheaper. However, the transaction price could surge due to supply and demand issues.

Price Actions: NVDA shares traded lower by 1.37% at $424.10 premarket on the last check Thursday.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons