AI chip keeps scarce and price rising

Related insiders unveiled, prices of Nvidia A100 hardly stop climbing from last December on and have risen 37.5% in the five months through the first half of April. Over the same period, A800 prices balloon by 20.0%. Meanwhile, delivery times for Nvidia Gpus have been lengthened, from roughly a month to three months or more. Indeed, some of the new orders "may not be delivered until December this year".

Server Gpus are mainly used in AI and high-performance computing. The rapid development of artificial intelligence industry has brought strong demand for AI computing power. Therefore, AI server has become the core support for the growth of GPU market. China Securities points out that the large language model represented by ChatGPT shows a high degree of intelligence. Generative AI capability continuously breaks through into the stage of auxiliary productivity. The computing power demand of AI model steps into another level, bringing a significant pushing effect on the server GPU market.

The H100, which was released last year, is Nvidia's latest AI chip, succeeding the A100 seen as the "workhorse" of AI applications and priced about $10,000. As of April 14, the H100 was selling for more than $40,000 a piece on ebay, which is a significant increase compared with previous price at $360,00 a piece. The figure is still mounting. On April 19, Time Finance found that there are currently five stores listing H100 chips for sale in ebay web, with prices generally around $45,000, the highest listed for more than $50,000.

Developers are using H100 to build so-called Large Language Models (LLMs), which are at the heart of AI applications such as ChatGPT by OpenAI. Tech giants participating in AI competitions spare no expense in acquiring AI chips. For instance, Microsoft has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase tens of thousands of NVIDIA A100 chips to aid in the development of ChatGPT.

In addition, according to recent media reports, Elon Musk, the "Iron Man," has established an artificial intelligence company called X.AI in Nevada, with the intention of competing with OpenAI. It is said that Musk has purchased thousands of high-performance GPU processors from NVIDIA for this new project.

NVIDIA also offers a supercomputer called DGX, which features 8 GPUs. Earlier this year, NVIDIA announced a new service that allows other companies to lease DGX computers for a monthly price of $37,000. Through this service, nearly any company can access these powerful but expensive devices through cloud leasing.