The United States issued an order preventing its technology from being sold to China to prevent it from being used for military purposes. As a result AMD and NVIDIA are prevented from selling their high-powered chips to China for artificial intelligence (AI) purposes. At GTC 2023, the NVIDIA H800 was launched as an alternative to their flagship chip the NVIDIA A100.
The difference between the H800 and the A100 lies in the memory speed, with the H800 cutting it in half. To train AI, a fast memory is needed to train the developed can. With memory that is half as fast, the process of training the model will double. This will directly inhibit the development of AI in China compared to the United States and its allies.
Meanwhile in the United States the Perlmutter supercomputer is the fastest in the world for training artificial intelligence. It is located at the National Energy Research Science Computing Center (NERSC) and is equipped with 6159 NVIDIA A100 GPUs.
The H800 will be used by Baidu, Tencent and AliBaba to train their artificial intelligence systems. Baidu just launched ERNIE Bot as a competitor to ChatGPT. Access to this AI is still limited even though its capabilities are said to be comparable to ChatGPT.