China's ByteDance Has Gobbled Up $1 Billion of Nvidia GPUs for AI This Year

Chinese tech giants ByteDance (TikTok), Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba simply can't get enough of Nvidia's High Performance Computing (HPC) products. This news comes from Chinese media, which reports that TikTok creator, ByteDance, alone, has already caught up (in pure dollar terms) to what the entire Chinese market ordered from Nvidia in 2022.

Chinese publication Jitwei revealed that ByteDance has already ordered around $1 billion worth of Nvidia GPUs in 2023 so far, which amounts to around 100,000 units split between Nvidia's A100 (ordered before the US government told Nvidia to stop selling its top-performing HPC cards to China, back in August 2022) and H800 cards - that last series number corresponding to a Hopper-based custom accelerator Nvidia built to comply with export restrictions — a nerfed cameo of the H100 accelerator. Nerfed or not, Nvidia's Average Sale Price (ASP) seems to sit at around $10,000 per accelerator.

Nvidia made some noise back when the export restrictions were first placed, saying it would lose roughly $400 million — and that such a loss could impair its H100 chip development. We'll never know whether the H100 accelerator's development would or wouldn't have actually been completed, though, since the U.S. government moved the export ban to September, allowing NVIDIA to cram in some of the extra shipments (and revenue) necessary for the H100.