For years, China and the United States have been locked in a sort of technological cold war, attacking each other with tariffs and accusations of all sorts. One of the latest moves by the United States is to limit the power of GPUs that can be sold in China, in order to prevent their use for AI. Well, then, Huawei could have prepared the Ascend 910C chip which would have a power similar to NVIDIA H100 graphics card.
The United States has imposed severe restrictions on China to slow its technological advance and stop relying on American technologies and companies. Perhaps the most important is the inability to import advanced processing machinery to manufacture chips.
China responded to this request/threat to take back Taiwan, its former colony. It should be noted that TSMC is located in Taiwan, the largest foundry in the world that supplies Intel, AMD, Apple and NVIDIA among others.
Huawei claims to have high-power chip for AI
Currently, graphics cards that can be sold in China cannot exceed a certain computing capacity. This limitation, imposed by the US government, is intended to make the cost of implementing AI systems unaffordable. The US government claims it is doing this to prevent China from using AI systems for its weapons and military systems.
For this reason, the Chinese have set to work developing their own AI-focused chips. Huawei, one of the most prominent companies in China, claims to have a high-capacity solution. According to various reports, the Ascend 910C would have a capacity similar to the NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
Several Chinese companies such as ByteDance, Baidu or China Mobile have already received samples of these SoCs. Currently, they are in the experimental and testing phase.
According to reports, it is not yet completely finished, but it is almost finished. It is said to be in the final stages of testing, which will soon allow its mass production.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the distribution of the first Huawei Ascend 910C will begin from October 2024. So we assume that production should start now, at the latest in early September.
These chips come to fill the void left by NVIDIA after the export restrictions imposed by the United States. Indicate that NVIDIA has created three special chips for the Chinese market, but of course of inferior quality and which do not meet the requirements of the industry.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Huawei has already received orders for more than 70,000 Ascend 910C chips. These orders are said to be potentially worth around $2 billion. A huge figure that could be just the beginning if it lives up to the expectations it has generated.
It is worth noting that Huawei has already given some hints about the Ascend 910C in the past. The company highlighted that it was 80% more efficient than the NVIDIA A100 in AI training tasks and 20% more powerful in some inference tasks. It is not known what improvements and optimizations the company has implemented, but if it comes close to NVIDIA’s latest solutions, it would represent a big step forward in AI for the Asian giant.
