NVIDIA’s Ampere A800 AI GPU, developed for China, has skyrocketed in price, owing primarily to rumors of a prospective ban on the GPU.
NVIDIA’s A800 GPU Witnesses a 10% Price Increase, Demand From Chinese Markets is Huge
For those who don’t know, the A800 and H800 are cut-down designs of NVIDIA’s high-end A100 and H100 GPUs. These GPUs were mainly made to bypass the sanctions made to thwart China’s tech superiority over the US. However, NVIDIA realized that the demand was immense, so it made an effort to sell a degraded variant to make its products available in China and ultimately benefit from it.
As expected, the GPU sold like hotcakes, and NVIDIA was unable to fulfill the demand, which is why the A800 rose to a significantly high price. However, it is now being reported through Wall Street Journal that the US government is considering an extended ban to prevent the accessibility of hi-tech equipment to China. This move could surely hinder the local markets since the AI hype is much greater in China, and such a ban could prove devasting.
This potential rumor has caused panic in the Chinese markets, so the A800 is now retailing for 110,000 yuan/US$15,211. This is an increase of 10,000 yuan from the initial launch price, which is enormous considering the A800 is a cut-down variant of the Ampere GPUs. The AI hype has received most of its traction from China, so even a GPU such as the A800 is in huge demand.
Regarding specifications, the NVIDIA A800 utilizes the same chip architecture as the Ampere A100 GPU. It comes in three variants, two PCIe variants at 40 GB & 80 GB and an SXM variant at 80 GB. The GPUs offer up to 9.7 TFLOPs of FP64, 19.5 TFLOPs of FP64 Tensor Core, 19.5 TFLOPs of FP32, 156 TFLOPs (312 TFLOPs with sparsity) TF32, 312 TFLOPs (624 TFLOPs with Sparsity) BFLOAT16 and 624 TOPS (1248 TOPs with Sparsity) INT8 performance. The 40 GB GPU features HBM2 memory with up to 1.555 TB/s bandwidth, while the 80 GB variants feature HBM2e with up to 2 TB/s bandwidth.
Although this ban rumor hasn’t been implemented yet, it has caused the AI GPUs to rise significantly. Out of all, NVIDIA is the one that is capitalizing the most from the AI boom especially considering that the company reached a trillion-dollar valuation through the boost in sales that AI gave.