China is the country of all the tensions in the tech world. Sanctions have been imposed to curb the development of a country that exploits American technologies. As a result, NVIDIA has had to adapt its products on several occasions in order to comply. Well, things are about to happen again and the Green’s H20 is now under threat… Not from Uncle Sam and potentially tougher sanctions, no. This time it’s China flexing its muscles with new rules on energy efficiency.
New rules on energy efficiency would condemn NVIDIA’s H20!
China’s National Development and Reform Commission is planning to introduce new energy efficiency rules for chipsets and data centres. These new rules would condemn the Chameleon’s hardware, which could no longer be sold in the Middle Kingdom. The aim, of course, is to favour domestic products such as Huawei chips.
Huawei is a threat to NVIDIA in the artificial intelligence sector. The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, himself admitted that the progress made in the AI sector by the Chinese company can no longer be ignored. In fact, the company’ s chips are being used for DeepSeek in particular. What’s more, the future Ascend 910Cs are expected to offer similar performance to the Green’s H100, while exploiting SMIC’s 7nm etch.
In short, a situation that is far from satisfactory for NVIDIA, as if the company loses this market, it represents a $20 billion drop in its annual turnover. We have also learned that a meeting with the chairman of the commission, Zheng Shanjie, has been organised. One possible reaction from the Chameleon is to adapt its H20 to comply with the new rules, sacrificing a little more performance and exposing the company to even more competition.
