Many Chinese tech giants are now looking at alternatives to Nvidia as Trump’s expanded export controls have banned the sale of the H20 chips that were built specifically around the previous Biden administration bans. According to the Financial Times, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu have already begun testing alternatives to Nvidia’s AI chips, like Huawei’s Ascend 920 AI chip, which was introduced soon after the H20 ban was announced.
Industry executives say that they have enough Nvidia AI chips stockpiled at present to ensure that AI development would continue without a hitch until early 2026. However, many are already looking at alternatives, especially given the uncertainty of how the H20’s replacement, the B20, and its AMD competitor, the Radeon AI PRO R9700, will perform. That’s because both companies must replace the higher bandwidth HBM memory with GDDR7 memory to comply with Washington’s rules.
