AsianFin -- Huawei Technologies Co. may soon take advantage of the latest U.S. export controls on artificial intelligence (AI) chips to grab more market share in China.
Credit：Pixabay
Huawei will begin massive shipments of its advanced Ascend 910C AI chip to Chinese customers as soon as next month, Reuters reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. Some shipments have been already made, the sources said. They also said Huawei distributed samples of the 910C to many technology firms and started receiving orders late last year.
The report came as the Trump administration tightened export for advanced AI chip exports to China, hitting American chipmakers, especially, the heavyweight Nvidia Corporation. Chinese companies have also been facing these export curbs and striving to find the replacement for Nvidia’s H20 chips.
Huawei’s 910C is reportedly a graphic processing unit (GPU) powered by upgraded architectural rather than technology breakthrough, while it can achieve performance comparable to Nvidia’s H100 chips combining two 910B processors into a single package through advanced integration techniques. Such design enables the new chip to deliver the computing power and memory capacity two times greater than the 910B, and has incremental improvements.
The report cited analysis that 910C has the potential to be a good alternative for Nvidia’s GPUs. The recent U.S. export controls on Nvidia’s H20 will mean that Huawei’s 910C chip will "now become the hardware of choice" for Chinese AI developers, Paul Triolo, a partner at consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group.
Researchers at Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek in February found that Huawei’s 910C chip delivers 60% of inference performance of Nvidia’s H100, better than expectations. With manual optimizations of CUNN kernels, its efficiency could be further improved. DeepSeek's native support for Ascend processors and its PyTorch repository allows for seamless CUDA-to-CUNN conversion with minimal effort, making it easier to integrate Huawei's hardware into AI workflows.
Huawei unveiled its next generation AI chip-- the 920 on April 10, a day after the extension of export controls on AI chips imposed by the U.S. government was announced. The H920 chip is expected to start mass production in the latter half of 2025, and experts say it will be able to replace the H20 chips that Chinese can no longer access, DigiTimes Asia last week reported.
Nvidia disclosed on April 9 that it was informed by the U.S. government the same day that the government requires a license for export to China, including its two special administrative regions Hong Kong and Macau, of the company’s “H20 integrated circuits and any other circuits achieving the H20's memory bandwidth, interconnect bandwidth, or combination thereof.”
The U.S. government indicated the license requirement addresses the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a supercomputer in China, according to the filling. It added that the government on Monday informed Nvidia the licence requirement will be in effect for the indefinite future.
Nvidia in the filling thus estimated its first quarter of fiscal year 2026 ending on April 27 will see about $5.5 billion of charges regarding H20 products associated with H20 products for inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves.
“The disclosure from Nvidia is very opaque and we will likely only understand the full situation when the government publishe[s] the new export restrictions,” commented Gil Luria. The analyst with D.A. Davison said Nvidia’s disclosure likely represents the value of H20 inventory they will no longer be able to sell Into China.
Marc Einstein, research director at Counterpoint Research, said the $5.5 billion in costs was in line with his estimates and that was the cost that Nvidia can bear. He signaled effect of the Trump administration’s trade policy is still in fluid.
"But as we have seen in the last few days and weeks, this may largely be a negotiating tactic. I wouldn't be surprised to see some exemptions or changes made to tariff policy in the near future, given this not only impacts Nvidia but the entire US semiconductor ecosystem," Einstein said.
H20, which is modified to have lower performance than other Nvidia chips, is the most advanced AI chips that Nvidia can export to China under the current export rules. Many in the semiconductor industry had feared the H20 chip would be one of new targets of the U.S. government because it is one of the chips that Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek used to train its popular reasoning AI model R1.
