Huawei Technologies is set to begin testing its next-generation Ascend 910D chip, which it sees as a challenger to Nvidia’s H100, with the first samples being received as early as late May, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Huawei, which has been on a US trade blacklist since 2019, has approached some Chinese technology companies about testing the technical feasibility of the chip, the report said.

The company hopes the 910D will be more powerful than the H100, released in 2022, which is a predecessor to Nvidia’s current flagship GPU, the Blackwell-based B200.

Nvidia challenge

Huawei is a key player in China’s efforts to develop a self-sufficient semiconductor industry, and has continued to make advances in the face of increasingly restrictive sanctions by successive US administrations.

The 910D, which follows the 910B and 910C, uses packaging technologies to integrate more silicon dies together to boost performance, the Journal’s report said.

The chip is less power-efficient than Nvidia’s H100.

Huawei is expected to ship more than 800,000 Ascend 910B and 910C chips this year to customers including telecoms carriers and Chinese tech giants developing AI, including TikTok parent ByteDance, which is an AI leader in China.

Some buyers have been in talks with Huawei to increase 910C orders after the White House restricted sales of Nvidia’s H20, a chip it had developed to comply with earlier China restrictions, the Journal reported.

As US restrictions make it more difficult for Huawei’s manufacturing partners such as SMIC to obtain advanced manufacturing equipment, large-scale production of AI processors has become more challenging.

SMIC has reportedly used older equipment that it has adapted to higher-end processes, at the cost of reducing yields, thus making the resulting chips more expensive.

AI clusters

In order to compensate for the lower performance of individual chips, Huawei has introduced systems grouping many chips together, such as the CloudMatrix 384, launched this month, which links 384 Ascend 910C chips.

The system is comparable or more powerful than Nvidia’s flagship rack system containing 72 Blackwell processors under some circumstances, although it consumes more power, some industry watchers have said.

Earlier this month reports said Huawei was set to begin mass production of the Ascend 910C for domestic Chinese customers as early as May, as it taps into demand released by new US restrictions on Nvidia and AMD chips.

Nvidia said it expected to take a $5.5 billion (£4.1bn) write-off on lost sales of the H20 after the new restrictions were announced, with reports indicating it had been caught off-guard by the move.