Huawei has recently launched its latest Ascend 910C AI chip, which has attracted global attention from the tech community. As tensions between China and the US escalate, the Chinese Communist Party has been boasting about achieving self-reliance in high technology. How does the performance of this Huawei chip compare to that of Nvidia’s H100?
According to The Wall Street Journal, Huawei has started providing samples of its latest processor, Ascend 910C, to large Chinese server companies, claiming that this new chip can compete with Nvidia’s H100.
In 2019, Huawei released the Ascend 910 chip, manufactured using TSMC’s 7nm process. Following the US Department of Commerce’s Entity List designation of Huawei in 2020, TSMC stopped manufacturing chips for Huawei.
In 2022, Huawei introduced the second-generation Ascend 910B chip, manufactured by SMIC, stating that this chip could rival Nvidia’s 2020 product A100.
The current Ascend 910C is an upgraded version of the 910B and is compared to Nvidia’s H100 released in 2022, which serves as the basis for China’s reduced version, H20.
In August 2022, Nvidia was banned from selling A100 and H100 chips to Chinese customers, leading them to downgrade performance and develop specially tailored A800 and H800 chips for the mainland market. Last October, the US also banned the export of A800 and H800 to China, prompting Nvidia to introduce H20, L20, and L2.
Compared to the H100, the H20 chip features a 41% reduction in core count and a 28% decrease in AI performance, yet it remains Nvidia’s best product launched in China. Analysts estimate that Nvidia’s H20 sales this year will reach $12 billion.
Huawei hopes to address domestic chip performance issues with the 910C chip. An analyst from SemiAnalysis stated that the performance of Huawei’s 910C chip may surpass Nvidia’s B20. B20 is another chip that Nvidia is developing targeting the Chinese market.
The Wall Street Journal cited insiders saying that companies like ByteDance, Baidu, and China Mobile are in preliminary discussions to purchase the 910C chip, with potential orders exceeding 70,000 units, worth around $2 billion.
In June of this year, a report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University in the US detailed the gap between Huawei’s Ascend 910 series chips and Nvidia, demonstrating the effectiveness of US chip sanctions.
The report indicated that while the first-generation Ascend 910 chip produced by TSMC has 30-32 active AI cores, the chips manufactured by SMIC, the second-generation 910B and third-generation 910C chips, have significantly fewer active AI cores. Each 910B chip can only activate 20-25 cores, while the original design of 910C was for 50 cores, reduced to 24 cores in subsequent versions, indicating manufacturing yield or capacity constraints by SMIC.
The report mentioned that Ascend 910B only represents incremental improvements over the first-generation 910, while industry leaders in the rapidly evolving tech sector have tripled chip performance. However, the performance of 910B is only 1.2 times that of the first-generation 910.
The report also pointed out that SMIC’s yield and cost efficiency seem to be low, posing a costly challenge for Huawei, SMIC, and their government supporters. Additionally, SMIC’s 7nm production capacity remains limited, forcing Huawei to choose between manufacturing its most advanced smartphone chip (Kirin 9000S) and AI chips.
Wang Xiuwen, assistant researcher at the Institute of Political-Military Affairs and Operational Concepts, Institute of National Defense and Security Research, expressed to Epoch Times that whether Huawei’s Ascend 910C AI chip performance can compete with Nvidia’s chips, it still requires practical market testing similar to Huawei’s 7nm smartphone chips.
Based on SMIC’s Q2 earnings report this year, although revenue increased by 22% annually, net profit decreased by 59.1%, earning the nickname “bleeding product.” Despite Huawei’s support from the Chinese government and continuous media hype claiming Huawei has broken through US restrictions, the performance, capacity, and yield of Ascend 910C remains a hurdle that Huawei must overcome, unaffected by media or think-tank brainwashing or external propaganda.
Wang mentioned that Huawei’s current aggressive marketing tactics in the Chinese domestic market may be seen as coerced sales. Buying Huawei chips also means purchasing Huawei solutions and cloud services. For leading Chinese digital companies, spending a significant amount on chips whose quality and usability are uncertain can hardly be viewed as satisfactory.
As tensions between the US and China escalate, the Chinese Communist Party continues to boast about achieving self-reliance in high technology and increasing national support while accelerating the replacement of American technology with homegrown alternatives.
A key focus of the CCP in substituting foreign technology is eliminating US chip manufacturers from China’s telecommunications systems. Chinese officials have instructed major telecommunications operators to gradually phase out foreign processors as their network cores by 2027, dealing a blow to American chip giants like Intel and AMD.
Although authorities have not explicitly prohibited Nvidia’s customized H20 for the Chinese market, informants suggest that Chinese government departments have informally advised domestic companies to use domestically produced AI chips rather than Nvidia’s.
On the other hand, Huawei, as a focal point in the escalating US-China tensions, receives unprecedented support from the CCP.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Huawei received government subsidies of $1 billion in 2023, four times the amount in 2019, totaling nearly $3 billion in subsidies over the past five years. With government backing, Huawei’s profits more than doubled last year, marking the largest increase in at least 20 years.
Wang mentioned that despite having a strong R&D team, if not for the CCP’s pursuit of the “great power dream,” pushing for greater achievements, Huawei would have continued cooperating with global nations, and it is uncertain how much progress could have been made in key technologies.
“The current situation forces Huawei to expend great effort to reach the technological level of European and American countries from a few years ago. Even with AI-assisted software coding, it’s unlikely that they can surpass the international alliance of ‘non-Chinese’ countries in the short term, with innovative capabilities inferior to those of Europe and the US. Furthermore, global AI models have yet to demonstrate profitable results, so the prospect of China’s AI dominance seems bleak. The more loudly the CCP propagates now, the more likely it will face significant challenges when market realities emerge in the future,” she commented.
The US and its allies continue to restrict China’s access to advanced manufacturing processes. In early September, the Netherlands required ASML, a company specializing in photolithography equipment, to apply for a license before selling its 1970i and 1980i immersion deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines to Chinese customers. These machines use multiple exposures to achieve advanced manufacturing capabilities.
This latest restriction undoubtedly poses another setback for the production of Huawei’s Ascend 910C chip.
Wang mentioned that the Dutch restrictions on exporting non-cutting-edge immersion DUV to China are evidently aimed at hindering China’s development in immersion multiple exposure technology. Without access to multiple exposure lithography machines, China must produce finer and smaller chips while being unable to imprint more precise circuit diagrams on the chips. This could lead to significant quality and performance issues in developing advanced chips.
Lee Guan-hua, head of the Policy and Regional Studies Group at the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan, stated to Epoch Times that the restriction goes beyond equipment sales to include post-sale maintenance, severely impacting China’s advancement in sub-14nm processes and undoubtedly affecting the future of its 7nm chips, whether for smartphone or 910 series chips.
“In fact, AI chips led by Nvidia are continually advancing. While China struggles with advanced processes being blocked, the gap between China and the rest of the world in AI, at least in terms of hardware, will only widen,” Lee emphasized.
Since 2020, the performance of new chips designed and produced by leading US AI chip design companies like OpenAI, Amazon, and Google significantly surpasses any of Huawei’s Ascend 910 series chips.
Currently in the US, Nvidia customers like OpenAI, Amazon, and Google will soon have access to Nvidia’s latest Blackwell chip and the GB200 series hardware driven by this chip, boasting performance several times greater than the company’s existing hardware.
Wang mentioned that China’s digital transformation requires a significant number of advanced chips. While the performance of Ascend 910C may be a breakthrough if it can only compete with Nvidia’s B20, it is far from a match for counterparts in Europe and America.
“I believe the CCP’s continuous high-profile propaganda claiming they have broken free from US control will only provoke more limitations and defenses from the US and its allies, increasing the pressure on the CCP. Even if China (the CCP) tries all means to break through, as long as China (the CCP) is seen as the biggest threat by everyone, it will be challenging to change this perception. The issue lies in whether the CCP’s strength is sufficient to defeat Europe and America. If not, the current display of power (in both military and semiconductor sectors) will only lead to self-destruction, leaving them crippled for many years. Even if China (the CCP) tries to break out, the more intense it portrays itself, the more swollen its face may become when market realities dictate otherwise,” she concluded.