(JW Insights) Jun 19 -- Chinese tech giant ByteDance (字节跳动) has ordered over $1 billion in GPUs from NVIDIA this year, approaching the total sales of commercial GPUs that NVIDIA sold in China last year, JW Insights learned from Chinese language press reports.

One source close to NVIDIA stated that ByteDance has so far received 100,000 A100 and H800 accelerator cards, including both delivered and pending orders. The H800 only began production in March of this year, said LatePost report.

A ByteDance insider shared that in June 2020, after the release of GPT-3, the company had trained a generative language model with several billion parameters using the V100 computing card.

LatePost reported that major Chinese internet companies with a cloud computing business have placed substantial orders with NVIDIA following this year’s Spring Festival. Another major company also placed orders worth at least RMB1 billion ($139.65 million).

Source from Alibaba Cloud revealed that Alibaba had also been actively purchasing GPUs in 2018-2019. At that time, Alibaba’s purchase volume reached at least tens of thousands of units, including V100 and T4 computing cards. Approximately one-tenth of these were sent to the Damo Academy for AI technology research and were used in the trillion-parameter large model M6 released in 2021, a Pandaily report said.

The same source mentioned that major companies like ByteDance and Alibaba mainly negotiate purchases directly with NVIDIA. Distributors and the secondary market struggle to meet their huge demands. NVIDIA offers certain discounts based on the scale of the purchase.

The current price of an A100 on NVIDIA’s official website is $10,000, while an H100 costs $36,000. The A800 and H800 models, which were launched in the Chinese market last year, are slightly cheaper, Pandaily reported.

(Yuan XY)