China's Largest AI Firms Reportedly Forked Out ~$16 Billion Total for NVIDIA H20 GPU Supplies in 2025

T0@st · Friday at 6:43 PM

Last week, industry reports pointed to evidence of NVIDIA H20 AI GPU shortages in China—supply chain insiders expressed frustration about limited availability, and alleged price hikes. Days later, local media outlets have disclosed staggering sales figures. Two unnamed sources opine that the likes of Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance have spent roughly US$16 billion on H20 purchases, across the first three months of 2025. Back in February, Reuters noted an extraordinary surge in orders for: "(Team Green's) H20 model—the most advanced AI processor legally available in China under U.S. export controls—driven by booming demand for Chinese startup DeepSeek's low-cost AI models." The unprecedented rush—to secure precious AI-crunching hardware—was likely motivated by whispers of elevated restrictions; coming from across the Pacific Ocean.

Curiously, local government bodies have allegedly "advised" a stoppage of H20 orders—a recent Financial Times article suggested that this message was directed at the nation's largest AI players (mentioned above). A few industry moles believe that NVIDIA's engineering department is working on another Chinese market exclusive AI chip, although it is not clear whether a new entrant will be designed to conform to recently introduced "not very strict" environmental regulations. Anonymous sources have made noise about an upgraded H20 variant; sporting fancy HBM3E modules.

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mtosev · Friday at 6:57 PM

No wonder that nvidia's stocks are doing well.

HBSound · Friday at 7:03 PM

Also, why are there no 5090 to support those who need it? When AI took off, the GAMES products took a backseat.
I wish they never released the 5090, if the plan was never to make enough products to support those who use and need without a store charging $4000 for a Gammer GPU.
If I had to pay $4000 for a GPU, I will get a professional GPU, because I see they hold value in the long run.

bonehead123 · Friday at 7:29 PM

mtosev said:
No wonder that nvidia's stocks are doing well.

Yea, for NOW... but this could come back to bite them in the arse, IF the Chinese start taking some of the cards apart & reverse engineer their own cheap-assed copies, or worse, tear some of them down & flood the market with the parts, either of which will hurt nGreediya in one way or the other....

HBSound said:
if the plan was never to make enough products to support those who use and need them...

But, but, that WAS/IS the plan all along, so their absurd prices could be justified and people had only 2 choices: pay up, or go without

HBSound said:
If I had to pay $4000 for a GPU, I will get a professional GPU, because I see they hold value in the long run.

Yea pro cards are like that....a few years ago, I remember parting out several old workstations that I bought from my company when they bought over 100 new machines which had the 2000 series pro RTX cards in them, which were somewhat outdated by the time, but I sold the GPU's for almost as much as they cost when new....and I made back every dime I paid the company for the machines, and then sold the cases, ram, mobo's, psu's and cpu's on top of that for even more profit (~$2.5k total IIRC)...

And fyi, I initially offered to list them on fleecebay for the company, so the money would have went to them, but was laughed at when I made that offer.....

Oh well, their bad

HBSound · Friday at 7:42 PM

bonehead123 said:
Yea, for NOW... but this could come back to bite them in the arse, IF the Chinese start taking some of the cards apart & reverse engineer their own cheap-assed copies, or worse, tear some of them down & flood the market with the parts, either of which will hurt nGreediya in one way or the other....

But, but, that WAS/IS the plan all along, so their absurd prices could be justified and people had only 2 choices: pay up, or go without

Yea pro cards are like that....a few years ago, I remember parting out several old workstations that I bought from my company when they bought over 100 new machines which had the 2000 series pro RTX cards in them, which were somewhat outdated by the time, but I sold the GPU's for almost as much as they cost when new....and I made back every dime I paid the company for the machines, and then sold the cases, ram, mobo's, psu's and cpu's on top of that for even more profit (~$2.5k total IIRC)...

And fyi, I initially offered to list them on fleecebay for the company, so the money would have went to them, but was laughed at when I made that offer.....

Oh well, their bad

I agree with you. I used to have the A6000, and if I had known this was going to be the ripple effect of the 5090, I would have kept the card.

mb194dc · Friday at 8:34 PM

Imagine the money waste, simply incredible.

There's still little decent revenue generating front end use case for any of this hardware. They'll never be in my view because llms are fundamentally flawed technology.

Freedom4556 · Friday at 8:51 PM

Still waiting on evidence that $16 billion spent on LLMs will somehow equal more than $16 billion in revenues...

The other shoe will have to drop on this AI craze, someday.

ymdhis · Saturday at 12:45 AM

HBSound said:
Also, why are there no 5090 to support those who need it?

There is, the 5090 for the AI market. They need it more, as evidenced by the fact that they are willing to pay for it even at inflated prices.

SOAREVERSOR · Saturday at 4:44 AM

HBSound said:
Also, why are there no 5090 to support those who need it? When AI took off, the GAMES products took a backseat.
I wish they never released the 5090, if the plan was never to make enough products to support those who use and need without a store charging $4000 for a Gammer GPU.
If I had to pay $4000 for a GPU, I will get a professional GPU, because I see they hold value in the long run.

You voted for this. Now get up to the cloud for your games and rent!

Bomby569 · Saturday at 9:21 AM

"unnamed sources opine" is very hot garbage. These isn't news.

Wirko · 2025-04-06T14:15:50+0100

bonehead123 said:
IF the Chinese start taking some of the cards apart & reverse engineer their own cheap-assed copies

Ha-ha? It's somewhat hard to copy a TSMC chip. It's far easier and cheaper to copy dollar/euro/pound/other bills *perfectly*, then flood the market with them.

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China's Largest AI Firms Reportedly Forked Out ~$16 Billion Total for NVIDIA H20 GPU Supplies in 2025

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