Huawei hands out the first samples of the Ascend 910C GPU. With help from its own government and from unexpected quarters, Huawei aims to take market share from Nvidia.
The first test samples of Huawei’s Ascend 910C GPU are said to be ready to send to local customers, Chinese news media write. The AI chips are supposed to be an alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs and are said to be comparable in performance to the Nvidia H100, although details about the chip are rather scarce. Previously, the chips struggled with unstable software.
Replacing Nvidia
The Chinese government is already prepared to give Huawei a boost. Chinese companies are urged to buy as many chips as possible from local farmers. The directive serves as advice: there is no question of a ban on American chips in China for the time being. Chinese companies know they had better follow advice from their government as best they can.
Starting in October, Huawei expects to officially deliver the chips as well. Huawei wants to compete fully with Nvidia in its home country. Nvidia is not allowed to sell its most advanced GPUs in China because of U.S. trade restrictions. The U.S. government wants to tighten those restrictions further and include less powerful Nvidia chips. So more Chinese companies will have to look for alternatives: that plays into Huawei’s hands to capture market share.
On your own two feet
China has to fiddle its own AI beans, and it seems to be getting better and better at it. Chinese researchers have reportedly succeeded in developing a generative AI model across multiple data centers. This is a feat that has not yet succeeded anywhere else in the world, given the complexity of combining different types of GPUs in a single data center, let alone multiple ones.
China may not have the most powerful GPUs of the moment, but it knows how to deal with that scarcity innovatively. The researchers seem to have succeeded in merging several GPUs together. The limited stocks of more powerful GPUs are merged with less powerful GPUs of which larger stocks are available.
How powerful the model developed with this technology is now in reality is not known. It does show that Chinese technology companies have learned to stand on their own two feet and the lag may not be as great as the U.S. government hopes.