Despite American sanctions, China’s Huawei wants to bring a chip onto the market that can compete with the Nvidia H100, which the company is no longer allowed to import.

If Huawei is not allowed to buy Nvidia H100 GPUs, it will build them itself. Chinese telecommunications companies are currently testing the Huawei Ascend 910C. The Wall Street Journal knows this. The Ascend 910C is a self-developed accelerator that will succeed the Ascend 910B from 2022.

While the Ascend 910B was still on par with a 2020 Nvidia A100, the Ascend 910C would suddenly be competing in the highest class of GPU acceleration. Nvidia has a successor ready with Blackwell, but this chip has been delayed and will initially only be available to a lucky handful of people with deep pockets.

Difficult production

Huawei is facing more problems than just a chip embargo. Production of the company’s own Ascend 910C is also not running smoothly. The manufacturer has no access to TSMC’s production lines and cannot import its own material from ASML. HBM memory also remains out of reach due to the embargo rules. However, other Chinese companies are becoming increasingly successful in producing HBM memory themselves.

For now, the question remains whether Huawei can actually roll out its Ascend 910C in sufficient numbers to meet the proposed specifications. The deadline for this is autumn. Even if that is not the case, Huawei and China are taking another big step towards autonomy. Huawei is working with partners to modernize its own chip production capacity. Sooner or later, China itself will be able to produce more advanced chips, and then competitive designs like the Ascend 910C will be ready.

Advantages and disadvantages

The development of the chip shows the duality of US trade sanctions. In the short term, they will have a major impact on the availability of competitive hardware for HPC computing and AI training in China. In the long term, they are pushing the country to develop alternatives to Western chips, with the risk of creating a mature chip industry capable of competing with Intel, AMD or Nvidia within a few years.