Last month it became known that Huawei Technologies had completed the development of new computing accelerators based on the Ascend 910C chip, which in terms of performance should be comparable to the Nvidia H100, which is subject to US sanctions in China. According to Chinese media reports, major Huawei customers have already begun to receive samples of accelerators based on the Ascend 910C.
Image source: Huawei Technologies
Having tested the new Huawei product, the company’s customers will be able to draw a conclusion about the advisability of further purchases. As noted earlier, Huawei customers can order up to 70 thousand of these accelerators. In the best case, Huawei will be able to produce from 1.3 to 1.4 million Ascend 910C accelerators, but everything will depend on US export restrictions, because while 7-nm accelerator chips for Huawei are produced by the Chinese SMIC, then HBM-class memory is still not available to Chinese manufacturers have to be obtained from abroad.
Customers admitted to the South China Morning Post that when purchasing Ascend accelerators, Huawei often imposes on them its related products such as telecommunications equipment and data storage systems. Nvidia has retained the ability to supply H20 accelerators to China and is now preparing B20 for the local market, and many large cloud market players in China continue to purchase solutions from this American supplier in order to maintain compatibility with existing projects and provide themselves and customers with Nvidia technical support. According to some forecasts, Nvidia will supply at least 1 million H20 accelerators to China this year, and its revenue in the local market will reach $12 billion even under sanctions.