The U.S. ban on exporting Nvidia and AMD AI-capability chips to China will create new opportunities for local companies, industry experts said, Reuters reports.
A group of independent experts measured the speed of processing AI tasks on the BR100 accelerator, developed by the Chinese startup Biren. The experts confirmed the company’s claim that the chip outperforms one of the processors that was subject to restrictions.
“Benchmark tests broadly reflect image processing and natural language processing, which are two fairly significant AI workloads,” said David Cantor, founder of the MLCommons evaluation group.
Biren, founded by former Alibaba and Nvidia staff, said it intends to start selling the BR100 chip to private data centres and cloud customers. The startup noted that it does not plan to work with the military.
In addition to Biren, firms are actively developing alternatives to Nvidia’s solutions, such as Cambricon, Alibaba Group’s PingTouGe, Iluvatar CoreX, Denglin Technology, Moore Threads, Vastai Technologies and MetaX. According to data from analytics firm PitchBook, these startups have collectively attracted more than $2.5 billion in recent years.
Computer science professor Jack Dongarra said that the United States has already used a similar scenario. Earlier, the U.S. government imposed an embargo on the export of Intel processors to some Chinese developers of high-performance systems.
“As a result, China has created chips for its supercomputers,” he concluded.
However, some analysts and executives at American companies argue that to gain a larger share of the AI market, firms need more than a fast processor. They must build a software ecosystem for accelerators that can compete with Nvidia’s CUDA, which dominates the AI market.
“New Chinese firms will need to prove that they are reliable, can update hardware, and offer an attractive software ecosystem,” said Paul Triolo, senior vice president for China at the strategic advisory firm Albright Stonebridge Group.
Earlier, in September, the U.S. government imposed licensing restrictions on the supply of Nvidia AI accelerators to China and Russia.
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