Huawei will reportedly mass-ship the Ascend 910C, a chip that rivals NVIDIA's H100 AI chip, to Chinese customers as early as May

The United States has restricted the export of AI chips to China, and in response to this, NVIDIA, the world's leading manufacturer of AI chips, is manufacturing and selling the H20 , which has lower specifications than the H100 , to China. Meanwhile, it has been reported that Huawei, a major Chinese electronics manufacturer, plans to ship the Ascend 910C, an AI chip comparable to NVIDIA's H100, as early as May 2025.

Exclusive: Huawei reads new AI chip for mass shipment as China seeks Nvidia alternatives, sources say | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/huawei-readies-new-ai-chip-mass-shipment-china-seeks-nvidia-alternatives-sources-2025-04-21/

Banned from China, NVIDIA loses ground to Huawei's next-gen AI chip
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/huawei-starts-mass-shipments-of-910c-ai-chip

Nvidia Stock: China's Huawei Launches AI Chip | Investor's Business Daily
https://www.investors.com/news/technology/nvidia-stock-china-huawei-ai-chips/

NVIDIA's AI chip, the H20, is developed and sold for China, but US President Donald Trump announced that he would impose licensing requirements on the H20 as part of efforts to tighten export controls on AI chips to China. As a result, China is in urgent need of alternatives to 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 information obtained by Reuters from a person familiar with Huawei's internal affairs, the company plans to mass-produce and ship its advanced AI chip, the Ascend 910C, to Chinese customers as early as May 2025. It has also been revealed that some of the Ascend 910C chips have already been shipped.

According to sources, Huawei's AI chip, the Ascend 910C, is a structurally evolved chip rather than a technologically advanced one, specifically, it is a combination of two of the previous models, the Ascend 910B, integrated into one package. This allows the Ascend 910C to achieve performance comparable to NVIDIA's H100.

It has been previously reported that the Ascend 910C offers performance comparable to NVIDIA's H100.

According to Huawei, the new AI chip 'Ascend 910C' is comparable to NVIDIA H100 - GIGAZINE

The Ascend 910C has twice the computing power and memory capacity of the Ascend 910B, supports a wider variety of AI workload data, and includes incremental improvements. Huawei declined to comment on the Reuters report.

The U.S. government's export restrictions on AI chips will allow Chinese semiconductor startups such as Huawei, Moore Threads and Iluvatar CoreX to enter a market previously dominated by Nvidia.

Paul Triolo of consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group said the U.S. government's export restrictions on Nvidia's H20 will 'make Huawei's Ascend 910C the hardware of choice for Chinese AI model developers and the deployment of inference capabilities.'

According to sources, Huawei will distribute samples of the Ascend 910C to multiple technology companies and begin accepting orders at the end of 2024. However, Reuters could not confirm which company is responsible for manufacturing the Ascend 910C.

It has previously been reported that some of the Ascend 910C's key components are manufactured using Chinese semiconductor foundry SMIC 's 7nm process (N+2) technology.

In addition, it has been reported that the US Department of Commerce may impose fines on TSMC because it has been found that Huawei's Ascend 910B uses chips manufactured by TSMC, but Reuters reports that at least some of the Ascend 910C also uses semiconductors manufactured by TSMC.

TSMC may be fined more than 140 billion yen for using its chips in Huawei's AI processors - GIGAZINE

TSMC maintains that it complies with U.S. government regulatory requirements and has not supplied any semiconductors to Huawei since mid-September 2020, but also argues that TSMC's role in the semiconductor industry is too large to prevent all unintended end uses of the semiconductors it produces.

Huawei has just announced the Ascend 920, a 900 TFLOPS, 4000 GB/s memory bandwidth AI chip manufactured using the 6 nm process node of Chinese foundry SMIC.

Huawei announces AI chip 'Ascend 920', mass production expected to start in the second half of 2025 - GIGAZINE