Huawei’s next-gen Ascend 910D AI chip has surfaced in supply chains, as the Chinese giant is set to replace NVIDIA as the dominant player in the domestic AI industry.
Huawei’s Ascend 910D AI Chip Is In The Sampling Stages; Partners To Get Chips As Soon As Next Month
Well, it seems like Team Green isn’t having a great time at all in China’s AI markets, given that not only is the firm subjected to new export restrictions, but its competitors, notably Huawei, are ramping up the competition with new and advanced AI solutions. Now, in a report by the Wall Street Journal, it is disclosed that Huawei is now in the testing phase of their next-gen Ascend 910D AI chip, and that domestic firms are set to receive samples by late May, showing that the firm won’t stop at all when it comes to conquering the local AI markets.
While details about Ascend 910D are uncertain, the report claims that the chip will be more powerful than NVIDIA’s Hopper generation H100 AI accelerators, which were a favorite of the Chinese AI industry back when the hype started. It is claimed that Huawei’s Ascend 910C chip didn’t manage to deliver to the expectations of the Chinese industry at all, since it was claimed to be a rival of NVIDIA’s H100, but only managed to compete against the more cut-down H20 AI GPU, which is still a massive achievement.
Huawei isn’t just making strides in the standalone AI GPU segment; the company has been developing capable AI clusters that compete with modern-day counterparts from NVIDIA. We reported previously that the firm had developed the CloudMatrix 384 AI cluster, featuring Ascend AI chips and performance comparable to NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72 “Blackwell” AI server, by simply prioritizing performance over efficiency. This shows that Huawei isn’t far away when it comes to technological superiority relative to its Western counterparts.
The only major problem Huawei faces right now is getting the essentials, since the supply chain is pretty confined for them. The Chinese tech giant currently relies on chips from SMIC and TSMC (which were sourced before the export restrictions), but due to having a low supply, the company cannot capitalize on the demand entirely. Apart from this, Huawei needs to rely on old technologies like HBM2, which means that it needs to rely on other methods to source more power, including ignoring perf/watt figures.
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