Huawei ramps up AI chip production | GPU hardware | List of hardware components | Computer hardware parts | Turtles AI

 Huawei plans major moves in the AI sector with the launch of the Ascend 910C chip, aiming to increase production and performance, competing with NVIDIA, consolidating dominance in the domestic market, and facing international challenges and trade restrictions successfully.

Key points:

•  Increased production of the Ascend 910C chip;
•  Improved yields from 20% to 40% with targets of 60% in 2025;
•  Parallel expansion with 300,000 Ascend 910B processors and consolidation of 75% of China’s AI chip market;
•  Development of proprietary CANN software to counter the dominance of the CUDA model.

 Huawei, overcoming the challenges imposed by U.S. restrictions limiting access to advanced lithography technologies and critical components, is stepping up efforts to achieve significant production volumes by increasing the yield of its AI chips: the yield of the Ascend 910C, produced through SMIC’s N+2 process, has increased from 20 percent to 40 percent, and the goal for 2025 is to reach 60 percent in order to achieve commercially viable production; In parallel, the company plans to make 100. 000 units of the 910C and 300,000 Ascend 910B processors, strategically intended to fill the gap left by the limited availability of Nvidia chips, which, due to sanctions, are sold in reduced version (H20) in China. The inference performance of the new chip, reaching about 60 percent of the power of Nvidia’s H100 GPU, has also been validated through tests conducted by DeepSeek, which has integrated its models on Huawei’s cloud platforms in collaboration with SiliconFlow, demonstrating the chips’ ability to support competitive AI workloads despite critical connectivity and memory management issues. In addition, Huawei is aiming to develop a proprietary software ecosystem (CANN and MindSpore) to overcome CUDA’s consolidated advantage, while negotiating strategic orders from tech giants such as ByteDance, Baidu and China Mobile, thereby strengthening domestic technology autonomy in a context where massive production of more than one million chips is expected in the coming year if current restrictions do not further intensify.

Huawei, after distributing samples to major domestic technology entities and overcoming critical issues arising from outdated plants and shortages of skilled personnel, intends to activate mass production of the Ascend 910C chipset as early as the first quarter of 2025, in a context marked by international trade restrictions; the new chip, whose inference performance approaches the level of NVIDIA’s H100 GPU, is part of a strategy aimed at strengthening technological autonomy and expanding presence in the domestic market, flanking the evolution of Ascend 910B processors and supporting the adoption of low and mid-level workloads by players such as DeepSeek, Alibaba and Baidu. 

The path described highlights Huawei’s ongoing commitment to adapting to a changing global landscape.