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Huawei is pulling out all the stops to grab as much of the Chinese AI GPU market as possible. That’s because the latest U.S. sanctions will likely put Nvidia’s leadership in China at risk. The U.S. Department of Commerce has imposed restrictions on exports of the H20 GPU to China. In practice, this chip will likely never reach Nvidia’s Chinese customers.
Nvidia has announced that this ban will create a $5.5 billion hole in its accounts due to the commitments tied to the H20 GPU it had purchased and the inventory of this chip it ultimately won’t fulfill. Some Chinese companies that bought large quantities of the H20 chip from Nvidia and planned to continue doing so include Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance. At this point, though, they’ll have to turn to an alternative—and Huawei has handed it to them on a platter.
Ascend 910D GPU Aims to Take Over Performance Leadership From Nvidia
Huawei responded quickly to the U.S. sanctions. Just hours after the new Department of Commerce regulation took effect, the company unveiled its Ascend 920 AI chip, a solution designed to fill the gaps left by Nvidia’s H20 GPU in the Chinese market. This proposal will enter full production in the second half of 2025, using 6 nm integration technology that Huawei and SMIC are believed to have developed side by side.
However, this isn’t the only way Huawei plans to increase its market share in China and beyond. According to Reuters, the company is preparing to start the testing and validation phase of a new AI GPU: the Ascend 910D chip. Unlike the Ascend 920 GPU, which is expected to compete with Nvidia’s H20 chip, the Ascend 910D is expected to outperform Nvidia’s H100 chip.
Until now, Huawei focused its hardware on mastering AI inference processes.
If confirmed, this move signals that Huawei has decided to compete in all segments of the AI hardware market where Nvidia is active. Until now, Huawei focused its hardware on mastering AI inference processes, not model training, as Georgios Zacharopoulos, a senior AI researcher working on inference acceleration at Huawei’s Zurich, Switzerland, lab, noted in a statement.
“Training is important, but it only occurs a few times. Huawei is mostly focused on inference, which ultimately will serve more customers,” Zacharopoulos said. Inference is the computational process language models use to generate answers that match user prompts. In any case, the available information suggests the Ascend 910D GPU will enable Huawei to compete with Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips in both inference and training.
Image | Rubaitul Azad (Unsplash)
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