Chinese technology companies are using Nvidia chips designed for gaming and workstations to power their AI systems despite efforts from the government to push domestic suppliers, the Financial Times has reported.
Citing multiple industry insiders, the paper said that tech firms in the country have bought more than one million consumer-grade GPUs this year amid a domestic chip shortage.
The US government began restricting sales of advanced Nvidia chips to China four years ago, and the Chinese government has made several attempts to encourage domestic AI
developers to use homegrown alternatives.
Major electronics manufacturers in the country have followed suit, with Huawei debuting two new AI-focused chips last month.
Despite this, the FT reported, Chinese firms are struggling to meet demand for the products, which is estimated to far exceed five million this year. Domestic supply in the country is expected to reach up to 3.5 million, including around one million chips manufactured overseas.
To bridge this gap, it added, companies are turning to Nivida-produced gaming and workstation chips, which are compliant with US restrictions but can be repurposed for AI workloads.
Most of these are GPUs in the RTX family, including the RTX Pro 6000D, RTX Pro 5000 and RTX 5090. These chips are not as powerful as leading Chinese chips, such as Huawei’s Ascend 910C, but can be used for simpler AI workloads, such as the prefilling phase of inference, which dictates how machines read a user’s prompt prior to decoding it.
Nvidia told the FT: “China’s domestic makers of workstation chips and cards have experienced unprecedented growth since 2022. US firms continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly a half a decade ago, and China’s own limits on US imports.”
Chinese chipmakers are responding to the mismatch between supply and demand, the daily reported, with companies including Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu and Cambricon working to rapidly scale up production.
