China bought chips from Samsung for $44 billion

In 2023, China became the largest importer of Samsung chips, surpassing the United States. This was reported by Sammobile with reference to The Korea Post.

According to the Samsung report, chip exports to China increased by 53.9% compared to the previous year and reached 64.93 trillion won (approximately $44.6 billion). For comparison, exports to the United States amounted to $42.1 billion. The main products supplied by Samsung to China are NAND flash memory, LPDDR memory, image sensors and display drivers.

The growth in demand for chips in China is explained by aggressive economic stimulus policies that will promote the upgrade of old devices to new models. The Chinese government has invested more than $20 billion in the development of the smartphone and home appliance market, which has a positive effect on Samsung’s sales.

But U.S. sanctions on the export of advanced chips to China are limiting Samsung’s ability to sell its profitable products, creating challenges for the company as it struggles to balance the two economic giants in a trade war.

According to the developers, the use of FlashMLA increases the number of Chinese company DeepSeek introduced FlashMLA technology, which allows to significantly increase the performance of Nvidia Hopper H800 chips.

What is FlashMLA?

FlashMLA is a software optimization that improves the performance of Nvidia Hopper processors without hardware changes. It increases the H800 memory bandwidth to 3000 GB/s, which is almost twice the standard maximum.

• Low-rank key-value compression — an algorithm that breaks data fragments into smaller parts for faster processing.
• Optimized memory usage — reduces memory consumption by 40–60%.
• Dynamic resource allocation — the memory paging system adjusts the load depending on the task, which speeds up the processing of variable-length sequences.

Bypassing US sanctions?

DeepSeek FlashMLA demonstrates the potential of software optimizations for the Chinese AI industry. In fact, it allows the H800 to be used with efficiency close to that of the more powerful H100, the supply of which to China is limited by sanctions.

So far, FlashMLA only works with the H800, but a possible expansion to other models could significantly impact the AI ​​computing market.

In addition to DeepSeek, Chinese researchers continue to develop methods to increase the power of available graphics processors. Recently, scientists from Shenzhen University and Beijing Institute of Technology increased the performance of the Nvidia RTX 4070 in peridynamics tasks by 800 times. However, this project has military-industrial implications, since it was developed in collaboration with Russian specialists.