Huawei reportedly acquired two million Ascend 910 AI chips from TSMC last year through shell companies
Enough dies to make 1 million Ascend 910C units

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.
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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.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.


















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Pierce2623 If TSMC doesn’t want your business, it’s pretty slimy to sneak if in like that. I used to claim that Huawei shouldn’t be treated as a direct proxy of the CCP, but they’ve clearly proven me wrong with this behavior.Reply -
Marlin1975 I don't get how this works? TSMC had to be in on this at least a little for it to work.Reply
Company A can't buy custom designed chips but company B comes along and wants to make the exact same chips that would be protected by company A. So TSMC does not see an issue and just makes them?
Even if they thought they were licensed they would pick the phone up and make a few calls and run it past their legal office.
Just does not pass the sniff test. -
TCA_ChinChin
I don't think TSMC doesn't want their business, but that they have no choice but to comply with US sanctions against Huawei. If TSMC could take Huawei's money without upsetting the US, they would gladly do so.Pierce2623 said:If TSMC doesn’t want your business, it’s pretty slimy to sneak if in like that. I used to claim that Huawei shouldn’t be treated as a direct proxy of the CCP, but they’ve clearly proven me wrong with this behavior. -
phead128 Greg Allen is an MBA think-tanker with CSIS. He is one of the biggest proponents of export controls on China, which has failed spectacularly. His target audience is the dinosaurs in Congress who couldn't tell you the difference between an CPU and GPU. I would take what Greg Allen he says with a grain of salt.Reply -
George³ I don't understand. Huawei acquired chips that were their own development and probably ordered for TSMC to burn in wafer before the embargo on this lithography process took effect. Where is the problem?Reply -
phead128
The question is how an MBA think-tanker who has "industry sources" knows more about sanction violations than even Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and Department of Commerce (DOC) and even the CIA/NSA/FBI ??George³ said:I don't understand. Huawei acquired chips that were their own development and probably ordered for TSMC to burn in wafer before the embargo on this lithography process took effect. Where is the problem? -
AkroZ
Ascend 910C begin production in 2024, the embargo was instaured in 2019.George³ said:I don't understand. Huawei acquired chips that were their own development and probably ordered for TSMC to burn in wafer before the embargo on this lithography process took effect. Where is the problem?
TSMC use many IP from USA, US law said they can restrain products worldwide when they use at least 25% US technologies.
To make a Ascend 910C with TSMC, globally around 40-50% american technologies are used.
Huawei invest heavily to reduce the dependencies on US technologies, but they are nowere near to produce "legally" Ascend 910C. -
bit_user
How would TSMC know what chip they're making? They're not in the business of reverse-engineering their customers' IP. By the time they get the design, it's not much more than a set of masks. Sure, you can figure out certain incredibly basic things about it, but probably nothing that's a dead giveaway. Given how many chips they make for how many different customers, many of which are not sold to the general public, I don't find this too surprising.Marlin1975 said:I don't get how this works? TSMC had to be in on this at least a little for it to work.
Company A can't buy custom designed chips but company B comes along and wants to make the exact same chips that would be protected by company A. So TSMC does not see an issue and just makes them?
The main way you probably figure out what you're making is if you can require information about their downstream use, and then you actually do your own independent checks to see if the story is plausible and if that's where they ended up going. That costs money and takes personnel. -
tooltalk
What's not working in so-called "targeted sanction" against China vs. country-wide sanction that many CCP shills oppose.phead128 said:Greg Allen is an MBA think-tanker with CSIS. He is one of the biggest proponents of export controls on China, which has failed spectacularly. His target audience is the dinosaurs in Congress who couldn't tell you the difference between an CPU and GPU. I would take what Greg Allen he says with a grain of salt. -
Pierce2623
I don’t think it’s TSMC’s responsibility to examine every design to make sure they don’t I fring on others’ IP. That’s the responsibility of the people designing the chips. Small Asian companies are getting matrix math chips fabbed like crazy right now and TSMC would lose a ton of money skipping on small batch orders paying 2-3x the per-wafer price of their big customers. They don’t heavily examine anything coming in for n7 these days anyways….Marlin1975 said:I don't get how this works? TSMC had to be in on this at least a little for it to work.
Company A can't buy custom designed chips but company B comes along and wants to make the exact same chips that would be protected by company A. So TSMC does not see an issue and just makes them?
Even if they thought they were licensed they would pick the phone up and make a few calls and run it past their legal office.
Just does not pass the sniff test.