ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba are all huge fans of Nvidia’s High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions. According to Chinese media, TikTok founder ByteDance has already caught up to what the entire Chinese market ordered from Nvidia in 2022.

According to Chinese publication Jitwei, ByteDance has already ordered around $1 billion in Nvidia GPUs for 2023, which amounts to around 100,000 units split between Nvidia’s A100, ordered before the US government told Nvidia to stop selling its top-performing HPC cards to China, back in August 2022, and H800 cards, a nerfed Nvidia’s Average Sale Price (ASP) appears to be around $10,000 per accelerator, nerfed or not.

Nvidia made some fuss when the export limits were first imposed, claiming a $400 million loss would jeopardise the development of its H100 processor however, ByteDance still managed to get its hands on the GPUs.

The increased investments are evident, as is part of the motivation: China cannot afford to let the West run ahead with complete supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence. China’s interest is fueled by the promise of the $4.4 trillion dollars AI can deliver to the global economy.

Remember that there are also political and sociological options here, in that China’s state control apparatus requires a steady flow of high-tech answers. We may overlook them in the midst of the chaotic soup of Generative AI and Large Language Models, but AI also enables CCTV analytics and facial recognition technology.

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