[News] Huawei Reportedly Begins Sampling of Ascend 910C to Rival NVIDIA

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Amid market rumors that the Beijing authority has been advising local companies not to use NVIDIA’s H20, which is tailored for the Chinese market, tech conglomerate Huawei is said to initiate sampling of its latest AI accelerator, Ascend 910C, to Chinese customers, according to reports by the South China Morning Post and Tom’s Hardware.

According to the South China Morning Post, large Chinese server companies and internet firms have received the samples of the Ascend 910C, which is regarded as an upgraded version of the Ascend 910B.

Sources cited by a previous report of the Wall Street Journal noted that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, search giant Baidu, and state-owned telecom operator China Mobile are in preliminary talks with Huawei to secure the Ascend 910C chip.

Citing remarks from Eric Xu, Huawei’s Rotating Chairman, the South China Morning Post indicates that as the AI chips embargo launched by the U.S. is unlikely to be lifted soon, the scenario gives Huawei an opportunity to step in.

Huawei’s Ascend 910B, which the company claims to rival NVIDIA’s A100, has been popular among multiple industries across the country for AI model training. According to the report by the South China Morning Post, the tech giant’s Ascend solutions were used to train roughly half of more than 70 of China’s top large language models as of last year.

According to the report, NVIDIA is projected to ship over 1 million H20 GPUs to China this year, generating around USD 12 billion in revenue. Initially, demand for the H20 was sluggish, but sales have steadily gained momentum in recent months.

In terms of the upcoming Ascend 910C, Tom’s Hardware notes that it may reportedly sell for roughly USD 2 billion together this year, as the launch time would probably fall in the fourth quarter.

However, it is worth noting that Huawei also stands to gain by locking Chinese companies into its Ascend 910C hardware-software ecosystem, the South China Morning Post suggests. Citing a server company employee, the report states that if a firm buys Huawei’s AI chips, it may also need to purchase other offerings, like network and storage solutions, which might cause some hesitation.

Read more

• [News] Huawei Rumored to Launch New High-End AI Chip, Potentially Rivaling NVIDIA’s H100
• [News] U.S. Reportedly Enhancing Chip Export Restrictions to China, while NVIDIA’s H20 Might Get Banned

(Photo credit: Huawei)