Huawei introduces the Ascend 920 AI chip to fill the void left by Nvidia's H20

(Image credit: Huawei)

On April 9, Donald Trump extended the ban on AI chip exports to China to include the Nvidia H20. Just one day after this, Huawei announced the Ascend 920—its next-generation AI chip—at a partner conference. DigiTimes Asia reports that the Ascend 920 is expected to hit mass production in the latter half of 2025, and experts say it will be able to replace the H20 chips that Chinese can no longer access.

The Nvidia H20 chip is still a popular option for Chinese companies despite being less potent than its latest AI offerings. The company has made billions of dollars selling this defanged AI chip to the region, with its sales reportedly growing 50% quarter over quarter. Unfortunately, the party is over for Nvidia, with the company expected to take a $5.5 billion write-off due to lost sales.

This is a massive opportunity for Huawei, which has been trying hard for years to match Nvidia’s capabilities. Its current AI chip, the Ascend 910C, seemingly delivers about 60% of the competing Nvidia H100’s inference performance. On the other hand, the next generation Ascend 920, which will use the 6 nm process node, is expected to exceed 900 TFLOPs per card and boast a 4 TB/s memory bandwidth using HBM3 modules. Furthermore, its 920C variant, which is built for Transformer and Mixture of Experts models, will also reportedly improve efficiency by about 30% to 40% compared to its predecessor.

Huawei’s Ascend 920 reveal caught a few industry insiders by surprise, especially as it was made almost immediately after the White House announced the ban on Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308. Moreover, Trump reportedly paused the planned H20 export ban after Huang spent a million dollars to have dinner with the president at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

But this planned expansion of export controls has reportedly been in the works for several months now, so it’s likely that the Chinese chipmaker has been anticipating its arrival. Because of this, Huawei has likely been working on the Ascend 920 in the background, and it was just waiting for the chip restrictions to drop before making its announcement.

Aside from the Ascend 920, Huawei also revealed its AI CloudMatrix 384 solution at the same partner conference. This rack-scale solution delivers more performance than the Nvidia GB200, but at the cost of higher power consumption. Despite that, it will probably attract attention from Chinese companies, especially as neighboring countries like Singapore and Malaysia are clamping down on smuggling rings trying to bring sanctioned chips into China.

TOPICS

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.