The Chinese government will compensate for electricity costs for data centers that abandon NVIDIA AI chips
The Chinese government is increasing electricity subsidies, which will allow the country’s largest data centers to cut costs by almost half. Thus, the authorities seek to stimulate the development of the domestic industry of artificial intelligence accelerators, reports the Financial Times.
Local authorities are trying to support large technology companies, including ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, which have suffered from rising electricity prices after the introduction of a ban on the purchase of NVIDIA chips.
The new subsidies appeared after a number of technology companies complained to regulators about rising costs due to the use of Chinese Huawei and Cambricon chips, which are inferior to NVIDIA in energy efficiency.
Regional authorities in the provinces of Gansu, Guizhou and Inner Mongolia have proposed programs that would reduce electricity bills for large data centers by 50% if they operate on domestic chips.
This is another step by China in its attempt to reduce its dependence on imported technology and develop its own semiconductor industry. According to experts, the power consumption of Chinese chips is about 30-50% higher than that of NVIDIA’s H20.
Huawei is trying to compensate for the lower performance of its main chip, the Ascend 910C, by combining multiple processors into powerful clusters, but this only increases power consumption. Nevertheless, even taking into account the higher electricity costs when using Chinese chips, China’s centralized power system remains cheaper and more environmentally friendly than in the United States, and so far does not face a capacity shortage.
