After Chinese companies lost access to Nvidia's leading-edge A100 and H100 compute GPUs, which can be used to train various AI models, they had to find ways to train them without using the most advanced hardware. To compensate for the lack of powerful GPUs, Chinese AI model developers are instead simplifying their programs to reduce requirements, and using all the compute hardware they can get in combination, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Nvidia cannot sell its A100 and H100 compute GPUs to Chinese entities like Alibaba or Baidu without getting an export license from the U.S. Department of Commerce (and any application would almost certainly be denied). So Nvidia has developed A800 and H800 processors that offer reduced performance and come with handicapped NVLink capabilities, which limits the ability to build high-performance multi-GPU systems traditionally required to train large-scale AI models.
