TrendForce: NVIDIA H20 export ban lift helps release demand, expected that the proportion of purchased chips in China's AI market will rise to 49%
TrendForce expects that the United States will allow NVIDIA to resume sales of the H20 GPU to the Chinese market, which will drive the proportion of purchased chips in China's AI market to rise to 49%. The resumption of H20 supply will stimulate demand for AI and cloud services, especially as large CSPs prioritize building data centers. NVIDIA will also launch the RTX PRO 6000 special edition to meet diverse application needs. It is expected that H20 will be favored, with an increased proportion of HBM consumption, but market development will still be affected by international circumstances, leading to uncertainties
According to the Zhitong Finance APP, TrendForce indicates that the United States is expected to allow NVIDIA (NVDA.US) to resume sales of the H20 GPU to the Chinese market. This policy shift will help drive demand recovery among local AI and cloud service providers, with expectations that the H20 will once again become the main high-end AI chip in this market, leading to a simultaneous increase in HBM demand. As NVIDIA may rush to meet its original shipping targets, TrendForce has raised the proportion of chips purchased from NVIDIA, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), and others in the Chinese AI market to 49%, up from a previous estimate of about 42% considering export bans.
TrendForce anticipates that the resumption of H20 supply will effectively release deployment demand for AI applications in China, especially as large cloud service providers (CSPs) will prioritize building their own data center infrastructure. Additionally, NVIDIA will launch a special version of the RTX PRO 6000 for this market to meet the diverse application needs such as edge AI inference.
From the perspective of HBM, the H20 shipped in 2024 will mainly be equipped with HBM3 8hi, and by early 2025, NVIDIA will gradually upgrade to HBM3e 8hi while increasing total capacity. Currently, China's self-developed ASIC products mostly use previously procured HBM2e, and the H20 is expected to be relatively favored, with its share of HBM consumption also increasing.
TrendForce analyzes that the development of the Chinese AI market is influenced by international circumstances, and there remains a certain degree of uncertainty regarding NVIDIA. It is expected that when the export ban on the H20 is lifted, local CSPs, OEMs, and other end customers will actively accumulate inventory, while domestic AI suppliers and ecosystems will rapidly develop under relevant policy support
