Chinese company Huawei has significantly increased the production of Ascend 910C artificial intelligence chips, a key breakthrough in China's attempts to create its own advanced semiconductors despite US sanctions.
This was reported by the Financial Times , UNN and UNN.
Details
According to knowledgeable sources, Huawei doubled the yield of high-quality chips from 20% to almost 40% in a year. This means that production has become profitable for the first time. The company aims to increase this figure to 60%, which is in line with global standards.
The breakthrough is a step forward in realizing China's hopes of building a computing infrastructure capable of supporting its growing artificial intelligence industry, despite U.S. export controls aimed at limiting the country's ability to develop sensitive technologies.
These efforts enjoy government support: Beijing is urging local tech companies to buy more Huawei AI chips and to abandon the $3.3 trillion US chipmaker Nvidia, which is still the market leader in China.
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In a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Huawei founder Zhen Zhengfei said that China no longer feels “lacking a core and soul,” a phrase that in 1999 described the country's technological dependence on the West.
I firmly believe that greater China will grow faster
Huawei's recent progress is also essential to China's goal of achieving full independence in the production of modern chips.
The world's leading chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company was forced to stop producing Ascend chips and modern smartphone chips in 2020 after Washington blocked Huawei's access to production using American technology.
Austin Lyons, a semiconductor analyst at Creative Strategies, a consulting firm, compared Huawei's production phase to TSMC's estimated 60% yield for the Nvidia H100 AI processor, a similarly sized chip. Based on this, it is possible that a competing product such as Huawei's will be commercially viable at a 40% yield.
Huawei has teamed up with the sanctioned Chinese manufacturing group Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp to relaunch its Ascend chip.
SMIC is currently using its so-called N+2 process, which allows it to produce advanced chips without extreme ultraviolet technology. Currently, China is prohibited from purchasing EUV lithography machines, the most advanced chip manufacturing equipment from the Dutch ASML group.
Shenzhen-based Huawei plans to produce 100,000 910C processors and 300,000 910B chips this year. This compares to 200,000 910Bs and no mass production of 910Cs in 2024. Such figures indicate that Nvidia will continue to sell more AI chips in China than Huawei, despite the fact that the American company can only sell its H20 chips to Chinese customers, a less powerful version of the H100 chips developed in accordance with Washington's export controls.
The consulting company SemiAnalysis estimates that last year Nvidia earned $12 billion by selling 1 million of its H20 chips to China.
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Huawei is facing difficulties trying to convince more customers to ditch Nvidia. One person close to the business pointed to Nvidia's Cuda software, which is known for being easier to use and able to process data faster than Huawei's offerings.
AI companies and researchers from Huawei have also said that the Ascend 910B is not well suited for training large-scale models due to inter-chip connectivity issues and memory problems. Huawei is reported to currently account for more than three-quarters of total AI chip production in China.