According to Reuters, Nvidia has begun receiving pre-orders for new artificial intelligence chips for the Chinese market from distributors, at prices similar to competing Huawei products.
The H20 chip is considered the most powerful of the three chipsets developed by the American company for the Chinese market.
Previously, the United States expanded an export ban on advanced chips to hinder China's ability to develop artificial intelligence and supercomputers for its military.
The H20 chip has less processing power than Nvidia's flagship H100 chip and also uses less power than China's Hyundai H800 chip, which was also banned in October.
The H20's specifications also seem to indicate that it is lower in some key areas compared to the Huawei Ascend 910B chipset.
In recent weeks, Nvidia has priced the H20 at between $12,000 and $15,000 per card for reseller orders in China.
Some distributors have begun to promote the chip at a very high price, and the price of the chip has risen to about 15,320 US dollars, while the Huawei Ascend 910B chip is sold for about 16,680 US dollars.
The H20 server, which retails for $194,650, consists of eight H20 chips.
The H800 server sold for $278,075 when it was released a year ago and consists of eight H800 chips.
Resellers are informing their customers that they may be able to begin shipping low-volume H20 products in the first quarter of 2024 and bulk shipping of H20 products in the second quarter of 2024.
Before the US restrictions, Nvidia dominated the Chinese AI chip market with a share of more than 90%.
The company is currently facing increasing competition from local competitors led by Huawei.
Huawei's Ascend 910B chip is widely considered the current competitive AI chip in China.
The popularity of the Ascend 910B chip has increased amid concerns that buyers may face new restrictions on the use of Nvidia products due to US sanctions.
The H20 tracks the Ascend 910B's performance at FP32, which is an important measure of how quickly the chip handles common tasks.
Nvidia chipsets outperform Huawei chipsets in connection speed, which measures the speed of data transfer between chipsets.
This means the H20 can still compete with the Ascend 910B in applications that require large numbers of chips to be connected together to function as a single system.
Reuters reported last month that Nvidia plans to begin production of the H20 in the second quarter of this year.
The project was scheduled to be launched last November, but the project was postponed as the server manufacturer encountered issues with chip integration.
CEO Jen-Hsun Huang visited NVIDIA's offices in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing last month to highlight the importance of the Chinese market to the company.