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

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.