Huawei unveils AI chip 'Ascend 920', mass production expected to start in the second half of 2025
As if responding to US President Donald Trump's decision to restrict exports of NVIDIA's AI chip 'H20' to China, Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei has announced a new chip, the ' Ascend 920 ', which competes with the H20.
Huawei introduces the Ascend 920 AI chip to fill the void left by Nvidia's H20 | Tom's Hardware
Huawei Unveils Its Next-Gen Ascend 920 AI Chip To Fill The Market Gap Created By NVIDIA; US Export Controls Are Working In Favor of China For Now
https://wccftech.com/huawei-unveils-its-next-gen-ascend-920-ai-chip-plans-to-fill-the-market-gap-created-by-nvidia/
Huawei's Ascend 910C AI Chip Cluster 'CloudMatrix' To Outperform NVIDIA's 'Blackwell' GB200 NVL72 Systems; China Catches Up The AI Hardware Gap With The US
https://wccftech.com/huaweis-ascend-910c-ai-chip-cluster-expects-to-outperform-nvidias-gb200-nvl72-systems/
The Ascend 920 is a chip manufactured using the 6nm process node of Chinese foundry SMIC, and is an upgrade over the previous model 'Ascend 910C' which used a 7nm process. In terms of performance, it is said to have 900 TFLOPS, memory bandwidth of 4000 GB/s, and the same chiplet design as the Ascend 910C.
Technology media Wccftech pointed out that 'it is claimed to be about 30 to 40 percent faster than the previous generation machine, so it can be said that the Ascend 920 is better than NVIDIA's H20,' and wrote that third-party testing is awaited to verify the validity.
NVIDIA's H20 is an AI chip designed by NVIDIA for China to circumvent US regulations. Although it does not perform as well as NVIDIA's most advanced chips, it is designed for AI and is very popular in China. In particular, the appearance of the DeepSeek-R1 in China showed that 'it is possible to develop AI comparable to the most advanced models in the US with a less powerful AI chip,' and this is said to have caused an explosion in demand for the H20.
NVIDIA plans to sell 1 million H20 chips in China in 2024 and earn 2 trillion yen in sales, selling twice as many AI chips as Huawei to show its presence - GIGAZINE
However, in April 2025, President Trump expanded export controls on AI chips to include the H20, making it difficult for China to obtain the H20.
The U.S. government demanded a license to sell NVIDIA's AI chip 'H20' to China, and NVIDIA recorded $5.5 billion in related expenses - GIGAZINE
According to a report from DigiTimes Asia, the Ascend 920 is a viable alternative to the H20 chip, and was 'surprised by a few industry insiders' because it was unveiled the day after Trump announced the restrictions. However, the expansion of export restrictions is said to have been planned for several months, and Chinese chipmakers likely anticipated its arrival and were working behind the scenes to develop the Ascend 920, technology media Tom's Hardware points out.
In addition to the Ascend 920, Huawei also announced the CloudMatrix 384 solution, which is made up of 384 Ascend 910C chips. This achieves high performance by making multiple chips function as a single chip, and is said to have higher performance than NVIDIA's most powerful AI server, the GB200 NVL72, but at the cost of higher power consumption.
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in Hardware, Posted by log1p_kr