Following the ban of its Hopper H20 accelerations in China, Nvidia is reportedly planning on launching new Blackwell-based solutions at a lower price this year, per Reuters. With mass production anticipated by June, we can expect these solutions to be widely available in the Chinese market by Q3 or Q4. While technical details are still emerging, we can already discern some important details and specifications.
Due to stringent U.S. export policies targeting China, the Hopper family has largely been a cat-and-mouse chase between U.S. regulators and Nvidia. Even before their official debut, the flagship H100 and H200 accelerators were already subject to export bans. Nvidia introduced the H800 to circumvent these regulations, which eventually faced a similar fate in October 2023. The cut-down H20 served as Nvidia's primary AI solution for the Chinese market in the interim until its recent ban under the current administration last month, which forced Nvidia to write off $5.5 billion in GPU supply.
