China AI Startup Stockpiled 18 Months of Nvidia Chips Before Ban
- Founded this year, Kai-Fu Lee’s 01.AI is already a unicorn
- Best AI training accelerators come from US firm Nvidia
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One of China’s emerging artificial-intelligence startups went on a buying blitz earlier this year to make sure it had enough high-end Nvidia Corp. semiconductors, before the US government imposed tighter export restrictions that cut off such chip sales to all Chinese customers.
The startup, 01.AI, bought enough of the chips to last for the next 18 months or so, founder and Chief Executive Officer Kai-Fu Lee said. Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, are considered the most advanced for training AI models, like OpenAI’s GPT4.