Huawei Ready To Send Mass AI 910C Chips, Nvidia Alternative Amid US Restrictions

Huawei launched the 910C chip, to customers in China. (photo: x @MarioNawfal)

JAKARTA - Huawei Technologies will reportedly start mass shipping its newest artificial intelligence chip, 910C, to customers in China. Even as early as next month, according to two sources familiar with the plan. Some shipments are even said to have been made earlier.

This move is a breath of fresh air for Chinese AI companies struggling to find domestic alternatives after the United States tightened exports of Nvidia's flagship AI chips, including H20 and H100.

According to a Reuters report, Huawei's 910C chip is a graphic processing unit (GPU) that does not represent major technological breakthroughs, but is the architectural evolution of the previous chip, 910B. By combining two 910B processors in one package using advanced integration techniques, 910C is claimed to be able to match Nvidia H100's performance.

This chip has twice the computing power and memory capacity from the previous version, as well as a number of additional improvements such as better support for various types of AI workloads.

The latest restrictions from the United States government on the sale of Nvidia chips to China, including the necessity to have an export license for H20 chips, make Chinese AI companies increasingly dependent on local solutions. In this context, Huawei's 910C chip is predicted to be the main hardware for AI model developers and inference capacity providers in China.

The latest export restrictions on Nvidia H20 will make Huawei's Ascend 910C chip the main choice for AI model developers in China, said Paul Triolo, partner at consulting firm Juli Stonebridge Group.

Since late last year, Huawei has distributed this chip sample to a number of technology companies and is starting to receive orders. Even so, it is not known exactly which company is responsible for the main production of the 910C chip.

One of the main components of this GPU is reportedly produced by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) with a 7nm N+2 process technology. However, the success rate of chip production is said to be still low.

Interestingly, according to two other sources, several chips in the 910C GPU use semiconductors created by Taiwanese company TSMC, for China-based Sophgo companies. This fact is being investigated by the US Department of Commerce, after TSMC's chips were discovered in the Huawei 910B processor.

Lennart Heim, a researcher at the RAND Technology and Security Policy Center, said that TSMC has produced nearly three million chips based on Sophgo's order design in recent years.

In response to this, Huawei confirmed that they did not use the Sophgo chip made by TSMC. Sophgo himself has not made official comments. Meanwhile, TSMC stated that they comply with all applicable regulations and have stopped supplying Huawei since mid-September 2020.

With the increasing geopolitical tensions and technological restrictions from the West, Huawei's efforts to take the lead in China's domestic AI industry appear to be getting stronger. The 910C chip could be a symbol of China's revival of independent technology amid global pressure.