A Chinese news outlet reports that ByteDance has purchased Nvidia AI GPUs worth $1 billion this year, making up for what the whole of China consumed last year.
While it’s yet to be authenticated, the report further states that other Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent, too, are gobbling up Nvidia GPUs to stay ahead in the AI race. Nvidia’s AI GPUs cost around $10,000 a piece and power the most exciting technologies like ChatGPT today.
Rushing For Nvidia AI GPUs
If you’re following the tech space lately, almost every major tech company integrates some AI feature in their suite. Be it Microsoft, Apple, or Google, all tech companies worldwide are rushing to develop the best AI models triggered by ChatGPT.
In this pursuit, Chinese tech giants like ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba are gobbling some billions of dollars worth of GPUs from Nvidia to stay relevant in the AI market. As per a Chinese publication, Jitwei (via TomsHardware), TikTok-owner ByteDance has already ordered $1 billion worth of Nvidia GPUs in 2023 so far – the same as the whole Chinese market consumed last year!
The total order of 100,000 units includes some of Nvidia’s A100 GPUs and some of the H800 cards. These High-Performance Computing (HPC) chips are necessary for developing Large Language Models that power Generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Google Bard.
Though Nvidia’s A100 cards are the most relevant for current AI needs, the US government has banned shipping their native technologies to China as a part of a trade war. This resulted in Nvidia creating a slightly underperforming AI card called the H100 series, which is now being shipped to China.
While the report is yet to be authenticated, we can mostly believe this considering how big ByteDance is and its interest in the AI field. After all, the company spent around $3 billion last year for share buyback, and it’s deal to throw away a billion dollars for its plans now.
