According to the latest report from The Wall Street Journal, NVIDIA, a leading artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaker, is developing a customized AI chip named B30 based on its latest Blackwell architecture for the Chinese market, with performance expected to reach 80% of Blackwell GPUs.
The Blackwell GPU series includes models such as B100, B200, and B300. The "standard Blackwell GPU" mentioned in the report is likely the B100.
The report states that NVIDIA has submitted an application to the U.S. government for an export license to sell the B30 chip to China. These negotiations began earlier this year, but it remains uncertain whether the license will ultimately be approved.
Previously, after meeting with Jensen Huang and approving the export license for the H20 to China, former U.S. President Trump told the media that he would not allow Blackwell chips to be sold to China without significant performance downgrades.
Trump said he would permit NVIDIA to ship Blackwell chips only if their performance is at least 30% lower than the company’s top-tier products. "I might make a deal on Blackwell GPUs that are ‘enhanced in a negative way,’" Trump told reporters. "In other words, subtract 30% to 50% from them." He also mentioned that Jensen Huang plans to meet with him again to negotiate the export license for Blackwell chips.
Trump’s remarks seem to lay the groundwork for the subsequent approval of NVIDIA’s B30. After all, if sales of NVIDIA’s H20 in China are underwhelming despite its renewed export approval, the Trump administration may not receive much revenue even with a 15% share of sales. If the Trump administration wants to secure more revenue from NVIDIA’s trade in China, it is highly likely to approve the export of the more competitive B30 to China. Naturally, the performance of the B30 will inevitably be significantly reduced compared to the top-tier B300—especially in terms of HBM capacity and memory bandwidth—but it should at least outperform the H20.
Earlier reports from Reuters indicated that NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell architecture GPU for the Chinese market is built based on the single-chip version of the B300 (namely the B300A), so its model may be "B30A."
According to available data, the B300A is built on TSMC’s 4nm process with CoWoS-L advanced packaging, featuring 144GB of HBM3E memory and a power consumption of 600W.
Reuters’ report further noted that NVIDIA hopes to provide samples to Chinese customers for testing as early as next month.
(Reprinted from China Grid https://news.eccn.com)