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.

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(Photo credit: Huawei)

According to a report from South China Morning Post, Wang Tao, Executive Director, Chairman of the ICT Infrastructure Managing Board at Huawei, recently stated at the World Semiconductor Conference and Nanjing International Semiconductor Expo that Huawei’s advanced Ascend 910B AI chip achieves an efficiency of up to 80% compared to NVIDIA’s A100 when training large-scale language models. In terms of specific test performance, it surpasses NVIDIA’s A100 AI GPU by 20%.

Reportedly, leading Chinese companies such as Tencent Holdings and Baidu have also purchased the Ascend 910B chip for conference tasks, indicating substantial market adoption of the chip and encroaching on NVIDIA’s AI chip market share.

Huawei’s self-developed AI chip, the Ascend 910B, adopts the advanced Da Vinci architecture and supports various AI computing tasks such as deep learning and inference. The chip boasts computing capabilities of up to 320 TFLOPS in half-precision (FP16) and 640 TOPS in integer precision (INT8), all while consuming 310W of power.

Reportedly, it’s expected that Chinese tech giants may now be considering a shift towards local AI products, which could pose a challenge to NVIDIA. Currently, China accounts for 17% of NVIDIA’s revenue in the 2024 fiscal year, making the competition in the Chinese market increasingly fierce for NVIDIA.

According to a previous report from Reuters, NVIDIA, in response to the US ban on high-end chips, provided three chips specifically for the Chinese market, with the H20 chip receiving significant attention.

Hence, there are reports of a price reduction for the H20 chip to stimulate demand and address the intense competition from Huawei in the Chinese market. It’s reported that the price of the H20 chip is over 10% lower than Huawei’s Ascend 910B chip. The chip is reportedly to be sold at approximately 100,000 yuan per unit, while Huawei 910B sold at over 120,000 yuan per unit.

Read more

• [News] NVIDIA Reportedly Facing Price Cut Pressure of H20 Chip in China Amid Competition with Huawei
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(Photo credit: Huawei)