Huawei takes on Nvidia’s Chinese clients with its AI chip sampling: Report

Huawei is sending its AI chip samples to top tech companies in China to expand its footprint in AI solutions and take on Nvidia’s Chinese clients as well as market share.

SCMP reports Huawei is testing new AI chips with clients in China including the firms searching for Nvidia alternatives for high-end servers. The Chinese tech giant is packing Ascend 910C chips for large server firms covering hardware testing and configuration.

Nvidia is the most popular AI chip seller in the global AI market including China. However, US sanctions on AI chips have barred the company from selling flagship chipsets to Chinese companies.

Since August 2022, the US restricted Nvidia A100 and H100 exports to China. These two are the most popular AI solutions for large language models and generative AI. The company later modified these two chips to a lower-end version A800 and H800, which got banned in October.

Nvidia has modified its chipsets for Chinese clients and developed H20, L20, and L2 GPUs to comply with US export guidelines and maintain its edge in the Chinese AI market.

Given this opportunity, Huawei started selling Ascend 910B AI chipset last year. It has changed the previous Ascend AI architecture and introduced this new version with various performance improvements to compete against Nvidia’s top sellers.

It also allowed the Chinese company to collect some early customers. However, the next version is expected to widen this reach in the high-end AI chipset market.

Huawei reportedly testing Ascend 910C for the past six months and cooperating with the Chinese tech industry to comply with the specifications as much as possible. Some of these potential customers ByteDance, Baidu, and China Mobile have already received the Ascend 910C chipset for testing.

These companies have placed large numbers of orders for the chip when it goes into production. However, Huawei spilled no beans on this matter and kept the AI chip progress low-key. The report also mentioned that the company could start shipping later this year.