For years, China and the United States have been engaged in a kind of technological cold war, attacking each other with tariffs and accusations of all kinds. One of the latest measures taken by the United States is to limit the power of GPUs that can be sold in China, to prevent them from being used for AI. Well, Huawei could have the ready Ascend 910C chip which would have a power similar to that NVIDIA H100.
The United States has imposed tough restrictions on China to slow its technological advance and stop it from depending on American technologies and companies. Perhaps the most important is the impossibility of importing advanced processing machines to manufacture chips.
China has responded to this with a request/threat to take back Taiwan, which was once its colony. You should know that Taiwan is home to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry that supplies Intel, AMD, Apple and NVIDIA, among others.
Huawei claims to have a high-powered chip for AI
Currently, graphics cards that can be sold in China cannot exceed a certain computing capacity. This limitation, imposed by the US government, is intended to make the cost of building AI systems unaffordable. The US government claims that it does this to prevent China from using AI systems for weapons and military systems.
Because of this, the Chinese have been busy developing their own AI-focused chips. Huawei, one of China’s largest companies, claims to have a high-capacity solution. According to various reports, the Ascend 910C would have a capacity similar to the NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
Several Chinese companies such as ByteDance, Baidu and China Mobile have already received samples of these SoCs. They are currently in the experimental and testing phase.
According to reports, it is not yet fully finished, but it is almost finished. It is said to be in the final testing phase, which will allow mass production soon.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the first Huawei Ascend 910C models will be shipped starting in October 2024. Production is expected to start in early September at the latest.
These chips fill the gap left by NVIDIA after the US export restrictions. Note that NVIDIA has created three special chips for the Chinese market, but of course, they are of lower quality and do not meet the demands of the industry.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Huawei has already received orders for more than 70,000 Ascend 910C chips. These orders would have a potential value of around 2 billion dollars. A huge figure that could be just the beginning if it lives up to the expectations it has generated.
Note that Huawei has already teased the Ascend 910C in the past. The company highlighted that it was 80% more efficient than the NVIDIA A100 in AI training tasks and 20% more powerful in some inference tasks. We don’t know what improvements and optimizations the company has implemented, but if it comes close to NVIDIA’s latest solutions, it would represent a huge leap forward in AI for the Asian giant.