Nvidia is building a new chip for the Chinese market that will be more powerful than the H20, and it’s doing it using its most advanced chip architecture; Blackwell.
This comes at a time when the company is trying to keep its foothold in China without crossing lines drawn by U.S. regulators.
The chip is unofficially called the B30A, and while it won’t match the raw power of Nvidia’s flagship B300, it’s designed to perform significantly better than the limited H20 China is currently stuck with.
The B30A uses a single-die design, unlike the dual-die setup used in the full-powered B300. A single-die means all the chip’s core components sit on one continuous piece of silicon.
This makes the chip easier to produce under U.S. restrictions, while still packing enough power to make it useful for Chinese developers. Nvidia is planning to ship test units to clients in China as early as next month, though no final specs have been released yet.
Trump opens door for scaled-down chip sales
Donald Trump, now back in the White House, recently said he might allow Nvidia to sell toned-down versions of its newer chips to Chinese buyers. He made the comment after announcing a deal that would force Nvidia and AMD to hand over 15% of revenue from certain chip sales in China to the U.S. government. Trump also said the new chips could come with “30% to 50% off” in computing power, calling the current H20 “obsolete.”
Despite Trump’s remarks, U.S. approval for new AI chip sales isn’t guaranteed. Lawmakers on both sides of Congress have been openly worried that even weaker versions of Nvidia’s top chips could still give China too much of a leg up in AI development. They’ve been pushing back on any move that might undermine U.S. control over next-gen chip tech.
For Nvidia, China is a revenue stream it can’t afford to lose. In the last financial year, 13% of its total income came from China. The H20 chip, which was created specifically to get around export restrictions, was banned in April before being cleared for sale again in July. But with ongoing regulatory uncertainty, Nvidia is now hedging its bets with the B30A and a second chip built for a different task.
New RTX6000D will launch in September
Alongside the B30A, Nvidia is preparing to deliver another chip to China. This one is built for AI inference tasks and is called the RTX6000D. It’s also based on the Blackwell design, but it’s cheaper to produce and weaker in specs.
This chip uses standard GDDR memory and is being deliberately built to stay under Washington’s red line. Its memory bandwidth hits 1,398 gigabytes per second, just short of the 1.4 terabyte threshold that triggered the H20 ban.
Nvidia is planning to send small batches of RTX6000D to Chinese clients in September, according to Reuters. The goal is to maintain interest from Chinese developers without breaching export limits.
But that’s proving harder as local chipmakers like Huawei begin catching up. Huawei’s latest AI chips reportedly match Nvidia’s in compute strength, though analysts still say they trail in software support and memory bandwidth.
Nvidia has argued it’s better to give China limited access to its hardware than to risk companies switching entirely to Huawei. That strategy is now under pressure. Over the past few weeks, Chinese state media has accused Nvidia chips of being security threats, and government officials have warned companies not to buy the H20. Nvidia has responded by saying its chips have no backdoors.
As for Nvidia’s public stance, the company said in a statement: “We evaluate a variety of products for our roadmap, so that we can be prepared to compete to the extent that governments allow.” They added: “Everything we offer is with the full approval of the applicable authorities and designed solely for beneficial commercial use.”
Despite the noise, Nvidia’s only real option is to keep building whatever the U.S. government will let them sell, and hope China keeps buying.
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Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/nvidia-building-new-china-ai-chip-blackwell/