Huawei Preps Ascend 910C To Tackle NVIDIA’s H100 In China’s Domestic AI Market

Huawei is all set to introduce a new AI chip, the Ascend 910C, in an attempt to counter the growing influence of NVIDIA in the region.

The Chinese AI markets have rapidly grown in just a year, which has prompted companies like NVIDIA to aggressively expand their product offerings despite restrictions from the US Government. Designing China-dedicated AI accelerators such as the H20 AI GPU shows that the region is of great influence for Team Green, and in light of this, multiple in-house solutions have popped up as well, with Huawei's Ascend AI chips dominating the race, competing directly with NVIDIA.

The competition is about to get much stricter, as the Wall Street Journal reports that Huawei is set to unveil a new AI chip, called the Ascend 910C, that's likely going to be much more capable than its existing counterparts. The firm claims that its upcoming AI chip is going to be comparable to NVIDIA's H100 AI GPU, which not only was one of the hottest-selling AI products in China before the US sanctions but still holds plenty of relevance in modern-day markets. So, given that Huawei's 910C competes with the NVIDIA H100, the market will get much more competitive now.

However, Huawei still faces major issues, particularly associated with the production delays in its current chips, and as we reported earlier, several Chinese firms have opted for NVIDIA alternatives only since Huawei is unable to cater to the gigantic demand. Given that the fear of further US restrictions looms around Huawei, the company believes that it might be deprived of the necessary components and machinery to establish a consistent supply chain. But things are looking pretty optimistic for Huawei, and here's why.

WSJ claims that Chinese companies like ByteDance and Baidu are in discussions to acquire Huawei's 910C AI chip and that initial orders of 70,000 chips, valued at $2 billion, are rumored to be placed collectively by those companies. With this, it can be assumed that a single chip costs around $28,000, which is a decent figure to pay for an option by Huawei, but given the potential capabilities of the 910C, it might attract massive attention.

Apart from this, Dylan Patel from SemiAnalysis claims that Huawei's 910C can perform better than NVIDIA's B20 "Blackwell" AI chip. With this, Huawei might snatch a gigantic share of NVIDIA's market since rumors are swirling that the Blackwell B20 AI chips won't receive approval from the White House. All in all, it's safe to say that things are turning out interestingly for Huawei, and given that the firm manages to maintain a steady supply, it is said that the company could be on its way to selling 1.3 million to 1.4 million 910C chips by 2025.

NVIDIA is indeed having a hard time maintaining its market dominance in China, given that the company is under the influence of political conflicts and that domestic companies are giving Team Green a tight competition, especially after this development. It would be interesting to see how the situation unfolds for Team Green.