The AI race between China and the United States of America continues, as reports surface pointing at huge data centres being planned in Yiwu, China. While Trump attempts to clamp down on the nation’s access to this tech by shackling Nvidia and launching investigations to potential chip smuggling, it seems that China will continue to move forward in its own plans for AI.
WCCFtech spotted a Bloomberg report revealing the plans for the massive facility which is to be built by several Chinese AI firms with support from the Chinese government. The plans will see at least 36 datacentres established. Though only a single building is expected to house the majority of the over 115,000 high-end Nvidia AI GPUs detailed in the plans, which is where things get a little confusing.
It’s not so much that China plans to build these facilities across its western desert, but rather where those cards will come from given the U.S. current restrictions.
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The facility may be the biggest planned for China, but it’s relatively small compared to what the U.S. has planned. Still, I wouldn’t expect the United States to lift the controls any time soon. This means China is going to have to figure out some other way to access these new cards. It won’t be as easy as calling Dell to haul over some racks of new Blackwell Ultra cards like what was recently installed at CoreWeave.
It’s also unlikely other countries are going to be super keen to help. Singapore is already under investigations for potentially helping to smuggle restricted chips into China, and with hefty fines most are probably trying to keep their noses as clean as possible.
China as a country does have access to a hefty supply of H20 AI accelerators that it might choose to allocate to this new data centre, but the goal would almost certainly have to be to have higher powered Nvidia chips installed instead. Maybe they’ll be able to use these old ones as collateral for a big loan to help with new fangled chips.
Assuming the report is correct and China is going ahead with the facility, that does imply a fair amount of confidence in the project. If the country is targeting those new Nvidia chips then it certainly expects to get them one way or another. That’s a helluva lot of infrastructure to build if you never intend on filling it with working servers.
If China isn’t able to import these chips, it could be that China is ready to make its own. Given Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang has commented on the country’s growing capabilities, China might be getting ready to fill its data centres with its own AI chips in the near future.
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