Nvidia dealer says it won't sell AI chips to Pharmacist Tien

The distributor of Nvidia's dedicated GPU lines for work in Vietnam confirmed that they do not sell the A100 line in the domestic market.

Pharmacist Tien at the ChatDST launch program. Photo: Pharmacist Tien .

On July 14, Pharmacist Tien posted a video introducing many of the company’s products on social media. Among them, the AI chatbot named ChatDST attracted attention with the statement “better than ChatGPT”.

The example Mr. Tien used for comparison was VRAM capacity. Pham Minh Huu Tien (Pharmacist Tien) boasted that the construction company's system had double the memory of ChatGPT (960 GB compared to 480 GB) by using 12 Nvidia A100 GPUs. In addition to providing unverified information about the product from OpenAI, the origin of the batch of processing chips also caused controversy.

Speaking with Tri Thuc - ZNew s, a representative of LeadTek Vietnam said that the company does not sell Nvidia A100 products in the domestic market. Therefore, they have never sold the above GPU model to Pharmacist Tien.

LeadTek is the wholesaler and exclusive distributor of Nvidia's dedicated graphics cards in the Asia- Pacific market, including Vietnam. Therefore, this is the only party that can supply the A100 product that Pharmacist Tien mentioned during the ChatDST launch.

Server using Nvidia's A100 chip. Photo: Nvidia.

On the other hand, AI chips are sensitive items, listed by the US as a controlled item in the trade war. Therefore, the distribution of this product is also closely monitored, and it is not easy to buy.

Previously, the University of Information Technology (Ho Chi Minh City National University) was one of the few units in Vietnam to own an A100 card. Specifically, the school purchased a DGX A100 computer set with 8 Nvidia A100 GPUs pre-installed for 10 billion VND in February 2024. To have a super server for scientific research, the University of Information Technology spent 9 months negotiating for Nvidia to agree to supply and export from the US.

Therefore, it is unclear how Pharmacist Tien came to own a server with 12 Nvidia A100 cards.

The A100 is an older generation chip, but is still widely used in AI servers around the world, serving the training of large language models and running chatbots. The new H100 version has significantly higher performance, is sought after by global big-tech, leading to out-of-stock. In Vietnam, only large technology enterprises such as FPT and VNG own this server.

On the other hand, there is no source showing that OpenAI uses a server with 480 GB of memory as Pham Minh Huu Tien announced. According to the parameters given by Pharmacist Tien, ChatDST runs on a platform of 12 Nvidia A100 80 GB GPUs, with a total of 960 GB of VRAM. The market price of each of these graphics cards is around 700 million VND, equivalent to an investment of 8.4 billion VND for this component, not including other components.

Meanwhile, a source from The Information said that OpenAI owns a data center containing about 350,000 A100 cards for inference. ChatGPT alone is using 290,000 GPUs, 24,167 times the configuration that Pharmacist Tien announced. In addition, this company also rents Microsoft's Azure servers to reduce the load when the number of users increases.

Source: https://znews.vn/dai-ly-cua-nvidia-noi-khong-ban-chip-ai-cho-duoc-si-tien-post1569649.html