Huawei reportedly acquired two million Ascend 910 AI chips from TSMC last year through shell companies

Although Huawei cannot legally obtain advanced chips made by TSMC, the company used shell companies last year to obtain compute chiplets for its Ascend 910 AI chips. The conspiracy was discovered by TechInsights and TSMC, which ceased to ship chiplets to Huawei's proxies and initiated an internal investigation. However, it was not clear how many chiplets it supplied to Huawei. According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Huawei obtained as many as two million Ascend 910 AI chiplets.

"However, TSMC manufactured large quantities of Huawei Ascend 910B chips on behalf of Huawei shell companies and shipped the chips to China in violation of U.S. export controls," the report by CSIS reads.

According to the report, "government officials told CSIS that TSMC manufactured more than 2 million Ascend 910B logic dies and that all of these are now with Huawei. If true, this is enough dies to make 1 million Ascend 910C units. […] Even though Huawei likely has the more than 2 million Ascend 910B logic dies made by TSMC, there is a question as to whether it has enough HBM to integrate with those dies […] It seems likely that Huawei does, however, since the U.S. plan to restrict all advanced HBM sales to China on a country-wide basis was leaked to Bloomberg in August 2024 and did not go into effect until December of that year, giving Huawei ample time to legally acquire HBM chips as part of a stockpiling strategy."

Although the report seems correct about Huawei's stockpiling strategy and even gives us an insight into how many chips TSMC produced for Huawei's intermediaries, it still contains several inaccuracies that lead to wrong conclusions.

The progression From The Ascend 910 To The Ascend 910C

Huawei's original HiSilicon Ascend 910, which was launched in 2019, consists of a Virtuvian AI chiplet, a Nimbus V3 I/O die, four HBM2E memory stacks, and two dummy dies. TSMC produced Virtuvian chiplets for Huawei from 2019 to September 2020, using its N7+ process technology, a 7nm-class node with some EUV layers.

After the U.S. government put Huawei on its Entity List in 2020, Huawei had to redesign its Virtuvian chiplet to make it at SMIC, which used its N+1 technology (1st Generation 7nm-class process) to build it. GPUs with the new Virtuvian chiplet are called HiSilicon Ascend 910B and have nothing to do with TSMC.

Later, Huawei developed a more sophisticated version of its Virtuvian chiplet for its Ascend 910C, which SMIC makes using its 2nd Generation 7nm fabrication technology (N+2). Contrary to the report, the Ascend 910C has only one compute chiplet. Again, the Ascend 910C has nothing to do with TSMC. As Huawei managed to deceive TSMC, the latter produced the original Ascend 910 chiplet for the company in 2023 – 2024, as discovered by TechInsights.

Ascend 910B And Ascend 910C Yields Are Poor

Another noteworthy thing about Huawei's Ascend 910B and Ascend 910C is that their yields are not exactly high, so most parts are shipped with some compute elements disabled. Also, only 75% of Huawei's AI chips survive advanced packaging, which is not a good result.

"However, the advanced packaging process by which two Ascend 910B dies and HBM are combined into a unified Ascend 910C chip also introduces defects that can compromise the functionality of the chip," the report says. "Industry sources told CSIS that roughly 75% of the Ascend 910Cs currently survive the advanced packaging process."

Nonetheless, Huawei continues to acquire millions of Ascend 910B and Ascend 910C for its internal AI projects and external customers. For example, DeepSeek claims that the Ascend 910C delivers 60% of the performance offered by Nvidia's H100, which may not be enough for training large language models but is good enough for inference workloads.