Nvidia has placed an order for 300k H20 chips from TSMC amid renewed US approvals for shipments to China. Meanwhile, in China, startup Z.ai has released an open-source AI model, GLM-4.5, capable of running on just eight H20 chips - yet claiming to be a leader in efficiency, competing with DeepSeek and OpenAI. In the autonomous transportation market, Waymo, an Alphabet company, has announced it will launch a robotaxi in Dallas in 2026 in partnership with Avis. On these and other topics - in our review of key events for the morning of July 29.

Nvidia orders 300k H20 chips from TSMC amid rising demand in China

Nvidia last week placed an order for 300,000 H20 chips from contract manufacturer TSMC, two sources told Reuters. One of them added that strong demand from China had forced the U.S. company to abandon its previous plan to rely only on existing inventory.

Donald Trump's administration in July allowed Nvidia to resume sales of H20 GPUs to China, reversing a de facto ban imposed in April for national security reasons to limit China's access to advanced AI chips.

Nvidia developed the H20 specifically for the Chinese market after export restrictions were imposed on its other AI chips at the end of 2023. In terms of processing power, H20 is inferior to H100 models and the new Blackwell lineup shipped outside China.

According to sources, the new order complements the existing stock of 600,000 to 700,000 H20 chips. According to U.S. research firm SemiAnalysis, Nvidia sold about 1 million of these chips in 2024.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a visit to Beijing this month that the volume of H20 orders will determine whether the company will restart production. At the same time, the launch of the entire supply chain will take nine months, he said.

Firefly Aerospace goes public with a $5.5 billion valuation  

Space company Firefly Aerospace has set its stock price at between $35 and $39 apiece in its upcoming IPO, based on which the rocket maker could be valued at about $5.5 billion, wrote CNBC.

The Texas-based company said in an updated prospectus Monday that it plans to sell about 16.2 million shares. The total amount raised could be as much as $631.8 million.

Firefly applied to list on Nasdaq under the ticker FLY in early July. Its stock exchange debut comes amid an intensifying space race, with giants such as Ilon Musk's SpaceX investing more in space exploration and startups seeking to go public, the channel said.

Voyager, also a space technology company, went public in June. And Innovative Rocket Technologies, a developer of reusable rockets, announced plans to list through a $400 million merger with SPAC.

Firefly manufactures rockets, tugs and lunar landing modules, including the Alpha launch vehicle for launching satellites. As of the end of March, the company showed a six-fold increase in revenue from $8.3 million a year ago to $55.9 million. However, its net loss increased from $52.8 million to $60.1 million. The company has an order book of about $1.1 billion.

A Chinese startup has released a cheaper alternative to DeepSeek and ChatGPT

Startup Z.ai (formerly known as Zhipu) has announced that its new GLM-4.5 AI model will cost less to use than solutions from DeepSeek, reports CNBC. Unlike the logic behind existing AI models, Z.ai claims that GLM-4.5 is built on a so-called agent-based architecture: the model automatically breaks down a task into subtasks to perform it with greater accuracy.

In addition, the model will be open source - developers will be able to download and use it for free.

According to Z.ai CEO Zhang Peng, the GLM-4.5 is about half the size of the DeepSeek, requiring only eight Nvidia H20 chips.

Zhang said that Z.ai has no plans for additional chip purchases because it already has sufficient computing resources. He did not disclose the cost of training the model, promising to release details later.

In January, DeepSeek shocked global markets by demonstrating that, despite sanctions, it had managed to create an AI model comparable in function to OpenAI's ChatGPT while achieving significantly lower training and operating costs. DeepSeek claimed that the cost of training its V3 model was less than $6 million, although analysts noted that this claim did not take into account the total investment in hardware - more than $500 million.

Waymo will bring robotaxis to Dallas in 2026 with support from Avis

Alphabet's Waymo division plans to launch its robotaxi service in Dallas next year, expanding the list of U.S. cities where it plans to launch in 2026, reports CNBC. The list also includes Miami and Washington, D.C., as well.

Waymo's Dallas fleet will be managed by car rental company Avis Budget Group, the new partnership announced.

Avis CEO Brian Choi said the agreement is an important milestone for the company, which aims to become a leading provider of fleet management, infrastructure and mobility operations.

Waymo is already testing robotaxis in downtown Dallas using Jaguar I-PACE electric vehicles equipped with the Waymo Driver system, which combines software, sensors and other equipment to provide a fourth level of autonomy (without driver input).

Dallas residents will be able to order rides through Waymo's app. In a number of other cities, the company cooperates with the Uber platform.

Waymo is well ahead of the competition in the robotaxi segment. While other developers of unmanned vehicles - including Tesla, Zoox (owned by Amazon), and startups Nuro, May Mobility and Wayve - are still striving for commercial launch, Waymo already conducts more than 250,000 paid rides per week in cities such as Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco.

What's in the markets

- Japan's broad Topix index was down 0.8 percent.

- In South Korea, the Kospi index rose 0.5 percent and the Kosdaq small-company index gained 0.2 percent.

- Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 fell 1%.

- Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was little changed.

- Futures on the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average were up 0.1 percent, while the Nasdaq 100 was up 0.2 percent.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor

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