NVIDIA's new China-specific B30 AI GPU allows multiple chips interconnected to act as one

NVIDIA is preparing a new AI GPU for China with new reports suggesting the new chip will be called the B30, meeting US export restrictions for the Chinese market, and is already getting major attention from Chinese cloud giants including TikTok parent company ByteDance, as well as Alibaba and Tencent.

The new NVIDIA B30 AI GPU is expected to shift away from HBM memory to GDDR7 memory, and will see NVIDIA counter-attacking the Chinese market that has been shifting to using in-house AI chip designs, with the B30 chip being fabbed by TSMC, it will also give Taiwanese supply chain partners to work directly with Chinese cloud companies.

In a new report from The Information, the new NVIDIA B30 AI GPU will allow customers to connect multiple B30 chips together to act as a single high-performance AI computing cluster. This means that even if the B30 is slower than homegrown AI chips in China, the fact that you can connect multiple one of them to act as one single high-perf computing cluster is a big, big deal.

NVIDIA plans to make over 1 million of its new B30 AI GPUs this year, which will be good for NVIDIA as it had to write off $4.5 billion in inventory losses from recent US sales bans on its H20 AI GPU into China.