SemiAnalysis expects the shipment volume of chips in H2 of this year to exceed one million.
Whether this optimistic expectation can be achieved depends on the specific performance of Nvidia in the following quarters. The company expects to release Q2 financial report at the end of August.
Morgan Stanley also gave a positive evaluation of the shipment status of H20 in its research report this week.
According to the latest expectations given by SemiAnalysis, a consulting firm in the chip industry,$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$The H20 chip specially provided for the Chinese market by the company is expected to greatly boost the company's performance in China in the current fiscal year.
Due to the significantly reduced computing power specifications of the Hopper architecture AI chip compared to the H100 and H200 chips, and even being outperformed by many domestic AI chips, rumors about this chip mainly revolved around "customers watching", and "product price discounts" and so on prior to its release.
However, at least from the perspective of SemiAnalysis, the H20 chip can still provide very important performance support for Nvidia.
The organization predicts that Nvidia is expected to deliver more than 1 million new H20 chips this year. At a single chip price of $120-$130, which is around 900,000 yuan, this means that this single chip will contribute more than $12 billion in revenue (nearly RMB 87 billion).
By comparison, in the fiscal year ending January this year, Nvidia's entire revenue in China was $10.3 billion. This also means that if SemiAnalysis's expectations can be met, the sales of the H20 graphics card alone will exceed all revenue in the previous fiscal year.
(Nvidia Annual Report, source: the company's official website)
After the release of the Q1 financial report on May 22 this year, Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun said during a conference call that the company will do its utmost to compete and succeed in the Chinese market. During the previous reporting period, due to business interruptions, (this part of the) business saw significant decline, and the current quarter (Q2 quarter) is expected to be similar. Huang Renxun said that he hopes to resume competition and do his best to operate the business, and then see how the results turn out.
Affected by restrictive policies, although Nvidia's revenue growth rate in the Chinese market recorded 50% (from $1.59 billion to $2.49 billion) in the Q1 financial report, the proportion of Chinese revenue in Nvidia's total revenue dropped from 22% in the same period of the previous fiscal year to nearly 9%.
Huang Renxun also said that due to the technological restrictions imposed on the company, Nvidia is facing more intense competition in the Chinese market.
In addition to SemiAnalysis, well-known investment bank Morgan Stanley also gave a positive assessment of the shipping status of the H20 chip in its weekly research report and emphasized the "strong demand in the Chinese market."
As for the "insufficient computing power" issue of the H20 chip, SemiAnalysis Chief Analyst Dylan Patel gave his interpretation: Although the H20 chip is weaker than domestic chips on paper, it still has certain advantages in actual use due to the advantage of HBM memory.
Another advantage, relative to computing power, is the ecosystem. Many companies initially use Nvidia's ecosystem and software to train their own artificial intelligence models, and switching infrastructure means additional expenses and time.
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