China’s Replacement for Nvidia’s AI Chips Arrives: Huawei to Start Shipping Ascend 910C in May

Huawei Technologies plans to begin mass shipping of its advanced Ascend 910C AI accelerator to Chinese customers as early as next month. Individual shipments of the chips have already taken place, and, as Reuters notes, the company’s plans coincide with a key moment: Chinese developers have been left without access to modern Nvidia chips due to new U.S. export restrictions.

Image source: Huawei Technologies

Since early April, the Trump administration has demanded that Nvidia obtain an export license to China for its H20 chip, which was one of the few allowed to be sold freely in the Middle Kingdom. Now Chinese companies are forced to look for domestic alternatives, and Huawei may fill the vacant niche with its new chip.

Huawei Ascend 910C is a graphics processing unit (GPU) that, according to experts, achieves a level of performance comparable to Nvidia H100. This was made possible by combining two 910B chips in a single package using modern integration technologies. It is specified that the new product has twice the computing power and memory capacity compared to the previous model, as well as improved support for various types of workloads related to artificial intelligence (AI).

While Huawei has officially declined to comment on its shipping plans or disclose the 910C’s specifications, experts believe the chip could become the go-to choice for Chinese AI developers amid increased technological pressure from the United States.

As Reuters learned, Huawei sent out test samples of the Ascend 910C to technology companies at the end of last year and began accepting orders. However, it is still unknown which companies are producing the new chip. According to sources, some components are manufactured by China’s SMIC using 7-nanometer technology, but with a low yield of good chips.

It also turned out that some 910C GPUs contain semiconductors made by Taiwanese company TSMC for China’s Sophgo. In this regard, the US Department of Commerce launched an investigation, since TSMC has not officially cooperated with Huawei since 2020. According to Lennart Heim, a researcher at the RAND Center for Technology, Security, and Policy in Arlington, TSMC has produced only about three million chips for Sophgo.

Huawei denies using TSMC chips in its processors. Sophgo has not commented on the situation, and TSMC has stated that it fully complies with export restrictions.