Where can a Chinese buyer purchase top-end Nvidia AI chips in the wake of U.S. sanctions? Two vendors there, who spoke with Reuters in person on condition of anonymity, said they could provide small numbers of A100 artificial intelligence chips made by the U.S. chip designer, pricing them at $20,000 a piece - double the usual price. While buying or selling high-end U.S. chips is not illegal in China, U.S. export restrictions have created a de facto underground market with vendors keen not to draw scrutiny from either U.S. or Chinese authorities.
Google claims to have the fastest supercomputer for AI and ML-related tasks than any other AI developer, because their supercomputer uses Google s own Tensor Processing Units, whereas others use NVIDIA s A100.
While countries such as Taiwan, China, France, Germany and the United States have extensive plans to support their semiconductor companies, the South Korean government is rare in singling out AI chips for a concentrated push. Seoul will put out a notice this month for two data centres, called neural processing unit farms, with only domestic chipmakers allowed to bid, an official at the Ministry of Science and ICT told Reuters.
Nvidia's next-generation H100 Tensor Core GPUs and Quantum-2 InfiniBand are now widely available, in Microsoft Azure and more than 50 partner syst.