Chinese non-tech firms have also been scrambling to buy Nvidia GPUs as landscape designer reveals order
- L&A Design, a Shenzhen-listed landscape designer, is just the latest non-tech Chinese company to tout its use of Nvidia GPUs
- Unexpected purchases by non-tech companies reflect the power of Nvidia, whose chips are considered key to power of large language models
Beyond the familiar Chinese Big Tech firms, a host of smaller companies have been scrambling to snap up Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) to develop their artificial intelligence (AI) products amid an escalating tech war between Washington and Beijing.
L&A Design, a Shenzhen-listed landscape designer, is just the latest non-tech Chinese company to tout its use of Nvidia GPUs. It said in a stock filing on Sunday that it is buying up to 128 units of Nvidia servers that contain high-performance GPUs for 435 million yuan (US$60.5 million) via a subsidiary. It did not specify the type of GPU it is buying.
The orders were placed on Monday with an intermediary called Shenzhen Runxin Supply Chain, and 64 servers are set to be delivered by Runxin before June 30, 2023 with the rest provided by the end of 2024, according to the filing.
L&A Design’s stock price in Shenzhen gained 20 per cent – the daily limit – on Monday as investors rushed to buy up its stock on the news.
Amid tougher US sanctions, California-based Nvidia tailored slower variants of its chips – the A800 and H800 – for Chinese clients, providing a window of opportunity for Chinese companies to stock up. However, the US government tightened its controls again in October this year, making it illegal for Nvidia to sell the A800 and H800 to China and threatened to ban any future workarounds.