This week, there was a lot of discussion about the expansion of US export control rules to include shipments of Nvidia H20 accelerators to China, which are quite popular there. As Taiwanese sources note, Huawei immediately took advantage of the situation, promising its Chinese customers to start deliveries of new Huawei Ascend 920 accelerators in the second half of the year, which can replace the banned Nvidia H20.
Image source: Huawei Technologies
As noted earlier, Nvidia has already managed to accumulate orders for the supply of H20 accelerators to China for a total of about $18 million this year, so the $5.5 billion to be written off in one quarter is only the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of assessing the impact of the new ban on its business. Nvidia founder Jensen Huang’s hasty visit to Beijing at the end of this week also speaks to the importance of the local market for the company’s business. However, his statements in the spirit of the need to “follow the letter of the law” work on the American audience, so one should not count on the imminent appearance of new Nvidia accelerators adapted to the requirements of the US authorities for the Chinese market.
Huawei is going to take advantage of this, as noted by DigiTimes, which intends to offer its Chinese customers Ascend 920 computing accelerators from the second half of this year, which can compare in performance with Nvidia H20. It is believed that the Ascend 920 accelerators will be manufactured using a 6-nm process technology and offer a performance level of 900 TFLOPs combined with HBM3 memory bandwidth at the level of 4 TB / s. The more advanced Ascend 920C accelerator will increase computing efficiency by 30 or 40% compared to its predecessor, as sources expect.
Huawei also had more sophisticated hardware solutions in store for its Chinese customers. For example, the AI CloudMatrix 384 system is designed to outperform the Nvidia GB200 in terms of performance, but will also have higher power consumption. With fewer opportunities for Chinese developers to smuggle Nvidia solutions through neighboring countries, Huawei’s products have a better chance of commercial success.