New US AI chip ban on China could become a golden opportunity for Huawei

Earlier this week, the US announced an advanced AI chip export ban on China and this hostile situation could become a window of opportunity for Huawei, according to industry analysts.

Nvidia is a leading GPU and AI chip provider in China, accounting for over 90 percent of the overall related market. But Huawei has been working on industry-grade AI models and training chips for quite some time now and it has developed alternatives to key AI offerings from Nvidia.

Huawei Ascend AI and Pangu model chips are the two prime examples of its progress. These provide powerful AI computing capabilities to enterprise customers. Although, Huawei has some disadvantages as compared to Nvidia but Huawei chips are sufficient in order to keep all of the operations functional in Nvidia’s absence.

Jiang Yifan, a chief market analyst at brokerage Guotai Junan Securities said that the latest US ban could give Huawei chips a huge response. However, the company needs to overcome several challenges in benchmarking the AI computing power and take it to the level of requirement of the customers. Something that Nvidia is able to provide but it may take some time for the Chinese tech giant.

However, Huawei acknowledged the opportunity way ahead of this ban and continues increasing investment in research and development of AI and LLM technologies.

At the 2023 Huawei Annual Summit, Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou unveiled several new strategies around all intelligent product development for the industry.

Huawei also launched the new Atlas 900 SuperCluster, which is a new AI computing cluster, the latest offering in Huawei’s Ascend series of computing products, making use of a brand-new architecture that’s optimized for training massive AI foundation models with over one trillion parameters.

The Atlas 900 SuperCluster comes packed with Huawei’s state-of-the-art Xinghe Network CloudEngine XH16800 switch. With high-density 800GE ports, the SuperCluster’s two-layer switching network can connect up to 2,250 nodes per cluster – equivalent to 18,000 NPUs – without oversubscription.

With all of its latest achievements in AI and growing industry-wide AI products, Huawei could seize this opportunity created by the US AI chip ban and work on its full potential.

(source)