Huawei has had a rough few years as US sanctions increasingly squeezed it out of international markets, but there’s plenty of business to be found in China. The firm is reportedly working on a new AI accelerator that could rival some of Nvidia’s most popular chips. The Ascend 910C may already be in testing at some large Chinese tech firms, and it could officially launch as soon as later this year.
The Ascend 910C is a follow-up to Huawei’s previous Ai accelerator, the Huawei 910B. Chinese firms gobbled up the 910B despite concerns that it might not be fast enough to keep up with Nvidia chips. However, companies had little recourse. Nvidia has been unable to send its most powerful chips to China for several years. It has attempted to design China-specific versions that circumvent the trade bans by limiting functionality in one way or another. However, chips like the A800 have ended up blocked as the US rolled out ever-stricter rules.
Currently, the H20 accelerator is the best Nvidia can offer in China, featuring 41% fewer cores and 28% less AI performance. Regardless, analysts have estimated Nvidia will sell $12 billion in H20s this year.
With the Ascend 910C, Huawei hopes to alleviate those performance concerns. Early reports claim the Ascend 910C is about as fast as the Nvidia H100, a 2023 accelerator that’s still one of the most potent AI chips in the world and was used as the base for the scaled-back H20. The H100 is Nvidia’s current top-of-the-line until we see the promised Blackwell Superchip launch.
The US has worked to keep China from gaining access to such capable AI technology out of fear it could be utilized for military purposes. However, Huawei’s ability to build the chips domestically throws a wrench in the US administration’s plans. A Wall Street Journal report notes that TikTok parent company ByteDance, Baidu, and China Mobile are all testing the new Ascend accelerators. These firms are considering large purchases to lessen their reliance on embargoed Nvidia technology as they develop large language models.
Huawei’s new AI chip might be as fast as the H100 from Nvidia, which is blocked from sale in China.
Credit: Nvidia
This is not the first time Huawei has pushed past US export rules. In 2023, Huawei released the Mate 60 Pro smartphone, which ran on the Kirin 9000s processor. This in-house chip was manufactured at China’s SMIC with a 7nm node, which should have been beyond the capabilities of the deep ultraviolet lithography machinery SMIC has at its disposal. However, it appears the firm modified the devices to produce more advanced chips. We don’t yet know if a similar workaround is being used to manufacture the Ascend 910C.
Washington’s war on Chinese AI has been escalating since 2018 when the first Huawei trade restrictions were implemented, and it’s definitely slowed progress. However, it increasingly looks like China will be able to grow its domestic technology sector to operate without Western technology. If it lives up to the hype, the official release of the Ascend 910C could get the country’s AI ambitions back on track.