Huawei guns for Nvidia market share in China — Ascend 910C GPU customer sampling begins

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Ascend 910C hoped to be H20 rival.

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Huawei is sampling its latest GPU for AI to customers in China according to reporting by the South China Morning Post.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the report says “large Chinese server companies… and internet firms” have received samples of the Ascend 910C. Although this new GPU is described as an upgraded Ascend 910B, it’s been unclear what exactly the chip is made of, ever since a report in August revealed its existence. Interestingly, the 910C may be able to outperform Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell-based B20 according to a prediction made by SemiAnalysis’s Dylan Patel.

US export restrictions have prevented Nvidia’s best GPUs from legally reaching China and thus have significantly slowed down the country’s progress on AI, leaving Huawei to fill the void. One of the company’s rotating chairmen, Erix Xu Zhijun, is quoted in the report as saying that the GPU embargo is “unlikely to be lifted anytime soon,” which gives Huawei the chance to step into the cloud computing market.

The H20, Nvidia’s fastest GPU it can legally sell in China, is projected to sell around a million units worth a dozen billion dollars according to the report. It’s substantially more than the 70,000 Ascend 910C chips worth roughly $2 billion dollars altogether, according to the August report.

However, much of the gap is down to the fact that the H20 arrived at the start of the year while the 910C is expected to launch in October, meaning Huawei’s competing chip will only be around for Q4. Assuming Nvidia does make around $12 billion with the H20 in China, the average quarterly revenue would be $3 billion, which puts the 910C’s expected revenue in the same neighborhood.

Huawei can also profit from getting Chinese companies into the Ascend 910C hardware-software ecosystem, according to one of the report’s sources, an employee of a server company. “If we buy Huawei’s AI chips, then we have to buy other things from Huawei, such as its network solutions and storage solutions, which makes some hesitate,” the source reportedly claimed.

Given that the H20 and some other Nvidia GPUs are still available in China, Huawei will undoubtedly have to contend with Nvidia’s influential CUDA ecosystem, something that has been an obstacle for AMD and Intel’s GPU ambitions. Additionally, if the 910C doesn’t make substantial improvements over the 910B, with respect to yields, that would also be a significant problem for Huawei, and at minimum would reduce the new chip’s profitability.

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Matthew Connatser
Matthew Connatser

Matthew Connatser is a freelancing writer for Tom's Hardware US. He writes articles about CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, and computers in general.

3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    This article is frustratingly thin on details, especially when tempting us with this morsel:
    The Article said:
    Interestingly, the 910C may be able to outperform Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell-based B20 according to a prediction made by SemiAnalysis’s Dylan Patel.

    I took a quick look at the home page, but didn't see any recent article specifically concerning Huawei's accelerators. If anyone has more information about them, please share.

    I did find this, but note that the 910C specs are just guesses:

    https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/08/13/huaweis-hisilicon-can-compete-with-nvidia-gpus-in-china/
    I'm pretty sure the reason their fp32 TFLOPS overshadows Nvidia's by so much is that they're probably Tensor TFLOPS, whereas Nvidia only supports vector operations on fp32. The closest corresponding spec for Nvidia's H100 would be 989 TF32 TFLOPS (495 without sparsity). TF32 is a specialized number format with the range of fp32, but only the precision of fp16. So, it's not quite equivalent, but should get us into the ballpark, when trying to interpret the above data.
    Reply
  • Anika38
    The US government really thought Chinese companies would sit back and do nothing about the sanctions. What China loves most is making money. They will pursue any innovation possible to gain market share in any field. These sanctions are so shortsighted. I guess it's just a four-year window perspective to get some votes. Gotta love democracy, lol.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Anika38 said:
    The US government really thought Chinese companies would sit back and do nothing about the sanctions.
    You underestimate how far behind China is on lithography, especially if they can't rely on equipment, materials, tools, and software from the west. While they're trying to play catchup, everyone else is continuing to make further progress. It will really take quite a while for China to close the gap, in spite of whatever they try to claim (such as their purported 5 nm capability, which is a stretch they managed to achieve via double-patterning on equipment procured pre-sanctions).

    Also, I have a feeling you're going by the headlines and overlooked this caveat:
    "Additionally, if the 910C doesn’t make substantial improvements over the 910B, with respect to yields, that would also be a significant problem for Huawei, and at minimum would reduce the new chip’s profitability."
    It's one thing just to make a chip. Being able to scale up volume production is what's really needed and that's where there are some serious doubts.
    Reply