Huawei Technologies is preparing to test its latest and most powerful AI processor, which the company hopes will replace some of the more expensive products of American chip giant Nvidia, The Wall Street Journal reports, writes UNN.
Details
The steady progress of one of China's leading technology companies indicates the resilience of the country's semiconductor industry, despite Washington's attempts to thwart it, including by cutting off access to Western chip-making equipment, the publication writes.
According to people familiar with the situation, Huawei has approached some Chinese technology companies to test the technical feasibility of a new chip called Ascend 910D. According to some people, the company is expected to receive the first batch of processor samples at the end of May.
The development is still in its early stages, and a series of tests will need to be conducted to assess the chip's performance and prepare it for shipment to customers, people said.
Huawei hopes that the latest version of its Ascend AI processors will be more powerful than Nvidia's H100, a popular chip used for AI training released in 2022, one of the sources said. Previous versions were called 910B and 910C.
This year, Huawei is going to ship more than 800,000 Ascend 910B and 910C chips to customers, including state-owned telecom operators and private artificial intelligence developers such as TikTok's parent company ByteDance, sources said. Some buyers are already in talks with Huawei to increase orders for the 910C after the Trump administration restricted exports of Nvidia's H20, sources said.
In April, Huawei introduced the CloudMatrix 384, a computing system that combines 384 Ascend 910C chips. Some analysts said the system was more powerful than Nvidia's flagship rack system, which contains 72 Nvidia Blackwell chips, under certain circumstances, although the Chinese system consumes more power.
Addition
Huawei has become a champion in China in the technology industry, where the US remains ahead. The Shenzhen-based company has developed some of the country's most promising replacements for Nvidia's AI chips. This is part of Beijing's efforts to form a self-sufficient semiconductor industry.