Countdown to Nvidia 2024 GTC, Will Huang Renxun Bring New Initiatives for the Chinese Market?

Nowadays, the craze for concepts such as big models, AIGC, and AGI is growing stronger and stronger. In addition to the big tech companies that are secretly rolling inward, NVIDIA, which has high barriers in technology, supply chain, and industrial ecology, has taken advantage of the situation and stood at the center of the AI main stage. As the demand for computing power grows exponentially, the importance of NVIDIA can be seen from the fact that Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and others have begun to develop their own chips.
From the soaring market value to lowering the threshold for AI PC devices, to issuing new regulations and prohibiting other hardware platforms from running CUDA through the translation layer... Nvidia's every move may have a greater or lesser impact on the AI circle. The GTC summit held in late March and early April every year, as a regular program for Nvidia to "show off its muscles" to the outside world, has become a grand event that attracts attention in the industry. Among them, Huang Renxun's speech in the kitchen wearing his iconic black jacket was the highlight that everyone was looking forward to.
At the 2021 GTC summit, the 14-second "fake Huang" fooled the whole world. It was not until 4 months later that the official revealed that a digital double of Huang Renxun was made based on Omniverse.
By 2022, Huang Renxun walked out of the kitchen and released nearly 20 new products in a sci-fi virtual space, including the H100 GPU, Grace CPU super chip, and the opening of NVLink for custom chip integration.
In 2023, the year when big models exploded, Huang Renxun shouted "AI's iPhone moment has arrived", which seemed to have pressed the accelerator for the company's take-off that year.

The year is 2024.The GTC AI Conference is scheduled for March 18-21. Huang Renxun will bring his annual sharing from 4:00 to 6:00 a.m. Beijing time on March 19, with the theme of "Witnessing the Transformative Moment of AI."

As the opening time approaches, more and more voices on the Internet have begun to speculate what surprises Huang will bring in this annual speech. Some people bet on robots, some are optimistic about smart driving, and of course there is no shortage of product iterations and innovations for AIGC...
It is worth mentioning that a few days ago, Huang Renxun returned to his alma mater, Stanford University, and attended the 2024 SIEPR Economic Summit. In his sharing at that time, he proposed,In the next 10 years, NVIDIA will increase the computing power of deep learning by another 1 million times, and talked about liquid cooling technology will become a future trend.

The author boldly speculates that Huang Renxun may further elaborate on the potential of liquid cooling technology and Nvidia's current layout in his GTC speech.
At the same time, in his speech, Lao Huang also talked about geopolitical risks. He said,The future trend is that countries will realize that they must establish "sovereign artificial intelligence" (Sovereign AI), that is, a country must control its own digital intelligence.
There is no doubt that Nvidia has a say in the collision of technology and political issues.
On November 16, 2023, the new export restrictions on chips and semiconductor equipment issued by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the U.S. Department of Commerce officially came into effect. The next day, NVIDIA's official Chinese website removed content related to the RTX 4090 graphics card.

HyperAI has previously reported and analyzed the RTX 4090 graphics card offline on NVIDIA's Chinese official website in more detail. Click to view details:Nvidia's Chinese official website deleted 4090, and the scope of the chip export ban was expanded, with A40 and A6000 listed

Although Nvidia subsequently launched chips "customized" for Chinese customers, judging from the market reaction, domestic manufacturers did not seem to buy into the "castrated version" chips, and "the response was far below expectations." This also led to Nvidia's share in the domestic market being squeezed, and domestic brands got more opportunities.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Huawei has received pre-orders from Chinese Internet giants for at least 5,000 Ascend 910B chips in 2023. Interestingly, many media outlets have pointed out in their reports thatAscend 910B is seen as the closest Chinese alternative to Nvidia's A100.

Regarding Huawei's competition in the domestic market, Huang Renxun also said in a public sharing:Huawei has been listed as a "very formidable" AI chip competitor.
During the Spring Festival this year, Huang Renxun attended the annual meeting in China. He wore a floral vest, twirled a handkerchief, and performed a duet with his employees. Some netizens interpreted Huang Renxun's actions as his emphasis on the Chinese market. Indeed, judging from the proportion of the Chinese market in Nvidia's overall business, Huang is definitely unwilling to give up this "fat piece of meat".
Therefore, as Chinese audiences far away on the other side of the ocean, in addition to caring about the latest products of industry giants, I believe that many people, like me, are more interested in knowing which blockbuster products released at this year's GTC can enter the Chinese market, and what new initiatives NVIDIA has for the domestic market.
The GTC AI conference is in the countdown. Let’s talk about what Huang will talk about this year.

Follow HyperAI’s official account to view the full interview with Jen-Hsun Huang in the video account.