AsianFin -- Nvidia Corporation shares fell as much as 4.5% before settling more than 2% lower on Monday. Shares of the artificial intelligence (AI) chip heavyweight dropped on more signs showed Chinese competitor Huawei Technologies Co. is taking on it with a new AI chip amid tightening U.S. export curbs on China.
Credit：China Daily
Huawei is readying its most advanced AI chip Ascend 910D, which it hopes could replace some higher-end Nvidia chips, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people famliar with the matter. It was said that Huawei has approached some Chinese tech companies about testing the 910D and is set to receive the first batch of samples of the new chip as soon as late May.
Huawei hoped the 910D processor will be more powerful than Nvidia’s H100, which is popular for training AI models, according to the report. The new chip, which uses packaging technologies to integrate more silicon dies to boost performance, is reportedly power hungry and less power-efficient than Nvidia’s H100.
The 910D chips are successors to Huawei's 910B and 910C chips and are still in an early stage of development. Huawei this year is poised to deliver more than 800,000 910B and 910C chips to customers, including China’s state-owned telecommunications carriers and AI developers such as TikTok parent ByteDance.
The report is the latest sign that Huwei is ramping up to take advantage of the latest U.S. export controls on AI chips to grab more market share in China.
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.
China accounted for $17 billion, or 13%, of Nvidia's revenue in its fiscal year 2025, Bernstein noted earlier this month. Though DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria estimates that as much as 40% of Nvidia's revenue comes from China owing to the chip smuggling.
Reuters reported last week Huawei will begin massive shipments of its advanced Ascend 910C AI chip to Chinese customers as soon as next month, and some shipments have been already made.
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.
