China looks for domestic Nvidia rival — but that’s proving challenging

Chinese companies are ramping up efforts to produce a viable alternative to Nvidia’s chips that power artificial intelligence as Beijing continues its efforts to wean itself off American technology.

U.S. sanctions slapped on China over the past few years, along with Nvidia‘s dominance in the space, have provided big challenges for Bejing’s efforts, at least in the short term, analysts told CNBC.

Nvidia’s well-documented boom has been driven by large cloud computing players buying its server products which contain its graphics processing units, or GPUs. These chips are enabling companies, such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI, to train their huge AI models on massive amounts of data.

These AI models are fundamental to applications like chatbots and other emerging AI applications.

The U.S. government has restricted the export of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China since 2022, with restrictions tightening last year.

Such semiconductors are key to China’s ambitions to become a leading AI player.

CNBC spoke to analysts who identified some of China’s leading contenders that are looking to challenge Nvidia, including technology giants Huawei, Alibaba and Baidu and startups such as Biren Technology and Enflame.

The overarching view is that they are lagging behind Nvidia at this point.

“These companies have made notable progress in developing AI chips tailored to specific applications (ASICs),” Wei Sun, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

“However, competing with Nvidia still presents substantial challenges in technological gaps, especially in general-purpose GPU. Matching Nvidia in short-term is unlikely.”

Chinese firms have a “lack of technology expertise”, according to Sun, highlighting one of the challenges.

However, it’s the U.S. sanctions and their knock-on effects that pose the biggest roadblocks to China’s ambitions.

Some of China’s leading Nvidia challengers have been placed on the U.S. Entity List, a blacklist which restricts their access to American technology. Meanwhile, a number of U.S. curbs have restricted key AI-related semiconductors and machinery from being exported to China.

China’s GPU players all design chips and rely on a manufacturing company to produce their chips. For a while, this would have been Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC. But U.S. restrictions mean many of these firms cannot access the chips made by TSMC.

They therefore have to turn to SMIC, China’s biggest chipmaker, whose technology remains generations behind TSMC. Part of the reason why it’s lagging behind, is because Washington has restricted SMIC’s access to a key piece of machinery from Dutch firm ASML, which is required to manufacture the most advance chips.

Meanwhile, Huawei has been pushing development of more advanced chips for its smartphones and AI chips, which is taking up…