- The WSJ reports that Huawei is preparing its own AI chip to take on Nvidia
- The company could get the first samples of the processor by late May
- U.S. govt. restrictions on Nvidia and others exporting AI chips may have encouraged Huawei to develop its own AI chips
It seems that U.S. tariffs which were in part meant to snuff out China's AI ambitions may have had the opposite effect. Apparently, the country's telecom and cloud behemoth Huawei is preparing to trial a new AI processor designed to take on high-end chips from Nvidia.
The Wall Street Journal reported reported that Huawei expects to receive the first sample units of the chip - dubbed the Ascend 910D - as soon as late May. It has apparently already asked several domestic tech players to help it test the chip's performance.
Huawei's new silicon is intended to outperform Nvidia's nearly three-year-old H100 GPU. Though it is no longer Nvidia's most powerful chip thanks to the more recent launch of the H200, the H100 has been wildly popular for AI workloads and model training. Companies including Google, Meta and Tesla have purchased thousands of H100 chips at an estimated $30,000 and $40,000 a pop.
Analysts expectations
Thanks to U.S. tariffs and other government restrictions, Nvidia and AMD have been essentially cut off from shipping chips to China. But Huawei is in prime position to not only serve its domestic market but also likely other international customers who can't or won't pony up for Nvidia's tech.
J. Gold Associates Founder and Principal Jack Gold told Fierce earlier this month that Huawei had previously developed 5G and other chips, adding that AI GPUs were probably next on the list.
“It will give Huawei and others a big boost in selling their own increasingly competitive chips [and] aggressively competing in the rest of the world,” the analyst said.
If it's anything like Nvidia's H100 chip, the forthcoming Huawei Ascend 910D chip could prove popular for building AI models and performing other complicated AI tasks like wide-scale facial recognition.
DeepSeek has already shown that there is enterprise demand for less expensive AI models. Companies like Alibaba, BYD and Lenovo are already integrating DeepSeek's model into their products.
Huawei's AI chip may end up being the silicon equivalent to the DeepSeek model.