- Nvidia is pitching its upcoming Vera CPUs to Chinese clients while advertising availability soon
- Move into data center CPUs pits Nvidia against traditional rivals Intel and AMD, which currently control the bulk of the market in China and other regions
- Nvidia’s move comes at a time when the Chinese government continues to advocate for home-grown chip solutions, and the US’s chip controls have effectively reduced its share to 0% of a lucrative Chinese data center market
Nvidia is apparently pushing to win Chinese customers for what its CEO regards as the next multi-billion dollar frontier for the company: data center CPUs.
The firm has spent the past two years watching the 2nd-most important chip market in the world effectively cut it out with a mix of consumer-grade chips and homegrown solutions such as Huawei’s Ascend offerings, backed by a Chinese government push for self-reliance.
While Chinese officials have held the line with soft barriers – no official restrictions on Nvidia’s chip exports to China exist in the mainland – Nvidia is seemingly betting on a reset in relations when it comes to its Vera CPUs for the data center.
Why CPUs and why now for Nvidia?
Nvidia’s Vera CPU is more than just another competitor in the market. It threatens to upend the existing status quo, with Intel and AMD chips dominating the market, by adopting an AI-first approach to its design.
Nvidia is presenting Vera as a CPU that is up to 1.8 times faster than current x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD in certain workloads, offers 4 times the memory bandwidth, and delivers up to a 50% increase in performance versus traditional rack-scale CPUs.
According to a Reuters report, at least one major unnamed Chinese cloud company intends to purchase 300 servers, each containing 2 Vera CPUs. The CPUs themselves are estimated to cost upwards of $20,000 before bulk discounts kick in.
However, whether this results in an order remains to be seen. Chinese regulators seem to be making a stronger push for self-sufficiency in their chip sector, prompting many of their AI startups and giants alike to opt for local chip options, such as Huawei’s Ascend and T-Head’s Hanguang.
Nvidia’s salvation however, might come from an unexpected place, as battle lines might be different this time around: the same AI export controls that crushed its Chinese business might work in its favor now.
Not only are CPUs considerably less regulated by US export rules, but the Chinese market is also reeling from a squeeze on server CPUs, with Intel pushing delivery lead times to as much as 6 months in some cases, even as AMD noted that the CPU market remains tight, with demand outstripping supply.
If Nvidia can navigate past the politics and the incumbent x86 architecture’s software advantage, as well as the ecosystem built around it, it might carve out an important piece of the lucrative Chinese data center market, even without the CUDA ‘stickiness’ that makes its GPUs so sought-after in this segment.
Whether that is enough to overturn the obvious advantage that both well-placed chipmakers (Intel and AMD) have in terms of an ecosystem, as well as the edge the domestic champion, Huawei, enjoys in terms of government-level backing, however, remains to be seen.
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Rahimnoorali11@gmail.com (Rahim Amir)
