The world’s most valuable chipmaker is far from giving up its desire to retain China as a key growth market. Nvidia is apparently putting together a new AI chip meant for sale in China that’s half as powerful as its flagship B300 Blackwell GPU, Reuters reported, citing anonymous sources.
This new chip, codenamed B30A, would be more powerful than the H20 GPUs the company is currently allowed to sell to China, the report said, though its design will be single-die in nature, unlike the dual-die design used in the more powerful B300 GPUs. The B30A would still have similar features to the H20, like fast data transmission, support for NVLink, and high-bandwidth memory.
The development of the B30A seems to be separate from another chip that the company is said to be developing for sale in the country, Reuters reported.
“We evaluate a variety of products for our roadmap, so that we can be prepared to compete to the extent that governments allow. Everything we offer is with the full approval of the applicable authorities and designed solely for beneficial commercial use,” Nvidia said in an emailed statement.
The news comes as the Trump administration in recent weeks has relaxed its stance on letting chipmakers export high-performance AI chips to China, though Reuters cited its sources as saying that approvals for this new chip aren’t certain at all.
As geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington are increasingly affected by the race to develop AI, critics argue that the U.S. must maintain its lead by controlling the supply of necessary technology to China. But Nvidia and its peers — finding themselves selling the equivalent of shovels during a gold rush — maintain that ceding the valuable market of China to rivals like Huawei would be tantamount to giving up entirely.
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