Huang Renxun is jealous of China's nearly free electricity
Recently at the Future AI Summit in London. NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun stated that China will surpass the United States in the field of artificial intelligence, because of lower energy costs and less regulation.
This is the strongest statement from Huang Renxun so far. The possible reason is that the Trump administration previously refused NVIDIA to sell advanced chips like Blackwell to China. Currently, NVIDIA's market share in China has dropped from 95% to 0%.
Huang Renxun criticized Western cynicism, which is too cautious and pessimistic compared to China's optimistic and open attitude. Different states in the United States may have 50 different new regulations. This seriously hinders technological innovation.
From the perspective of leading companies in the AI field such as NVIDIA, the U.S. government's export restrictions are stimulating China to develop its own chip industry. They believe that it should allow the U.S. and China to continue to rely on U.S. technology, rather than forcing China to replace market share with domestic enterprises.
Recently, China has cut the use of foreign chips, requiring all data centers supported by national and government funds not to use any foreign chips, even special versions provided for China. Instead, they have switched to domestic products such as Huawei and Cambricon.
Although the current chips in China are not as efficient as the cutting-edge chips from NVIDIA and Intel, and the operating costs are higher. However, China has introduced a series of subsidy policies to help companies reduce their burdens!
The Financial Times recently reported that Chinese tech companies (such as ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent) have lower costs for running artificial intelligence systems due to government energy subsidies.
Huang Renxun said that electricity in China is almost free.
The bottleneck for current and next-generation AI is not processors, but transformers and electricity. China generates 10.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, while the United States generated 4.4 trillion kilowatt-hours this year. China is 2.39 times that of the United States!
According to the information, provinces such as Gansu, Guizhou, and Inner Mongolia provide electricity subsidies of up to 50% for data centers. In some areas, electricity prices have fallen below $0.03 per kilowatt-hour, while the industrial electricity price in the United States is about $0.15 per kilowatt-hour. The result is that companies can apply domestic products on a large scale at low cost.
This is behind the strategic plan of green electricity in western China and computing power in eastern China. Meanwhile, the U.S. grid is aging, and the construction of nuclear power plants lags behind. Elon Musk once lamented that transformers are more scarce than chips.
Original: www.toutiao.com/article/1848011797486599/
Statement: This article represents the views of the author.