[News] China Advances in AI Chips: Huawei Reportedly Boosts Yield to 40%, Making Ascend Line Profitable

China appears to be quickly catching up in the memory sector, with CXMT and YMTC leading the charge. Now, the country seems to be making strides in AI chips as well, an area dominated by U.S. giant NVIDIA. According to the Financial Times, Huawei has boosted the yield of its latest AI chips to nearly 40%, doubling from 20% a year ago.

Notably, this milestone has made Huawei’s Ascend chip production line profitable for the first time, marking a major achievement for the tech conglomerate, the report suggests.

Huawei is now rolling out its Ascend 910C processors and aims to boost yields further to 60%, aligning with industry standards for similar chips, the report adds.

The Financial Times report indicates that Huawei plans to produce 100K 910C processors and 300K 910B chips in 2025, up from 200K 910B chips and no 910C production in 2024.

Given that TSMC was forced to halt the production of Ascend and other advanced Huawei chips in 2020 due to U.S. sanctions, this achievement is no small feat.

According to previous reports from Wccftech and Tom’s Hardware, Huawei’s Ascend 910C is a fully in-house chip built on SMIC’s 7nm N+2 process, featuring 53 billion transistors. Like its predecessor, the Ascend 910, it uses chiplet packaging, but while the original was made by TSMC on N7+, the 910C’s compute chiplet is produced by SMIC, as noted by the reports.

Ascend 910C achieves 60% of NVIDIA H100’s performance, delivering strong inference results, as noted by Wccftech and Tom’s Hardware.

But for now, NVIDIA still dominates the Chinese market. Another Reuters report notes that Chinese companies are increasing orders for NVIDIA’s H20 AI chip, driven by the rising demand for DeepSeek’s affordable AI models.

Read more

• [News] DeepSeek Reportedly Reveals Huawei’s Ascend 910C Reaches 60% of NVIDIA H100’s Inference Power
• [News] Huawei Reportedly Begins Sampling of Ascend 910C to Rival NVIDIA

(Photo credit: Huawei)