Huawei Technologies is preparing to test its most powerful artificial intelligence chip, the Ascend 910D, which is designed to replace advanced Nvidia chips in the Chinese market. This comes after six years of U.S. efforts to blacklist Huawei and restrict its access to advanced semiconductors amid a deepening AI race and trade war between the two economic superpowers. 

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Ascend 910D’s technical feasibility will be conducted over the next several weeks. People familiar with the new chip said that these processors will be much more powerful than Nvidia’s H100 chips, which are used for training AI models.

However… 

The company’s new chip uses packaging technologies to integrate more silicon dies together to boost performance, said people familiar with the matter. The 910D is power hungry and is less power-efficient than Nvidia’s H100, the people said.-WSJ 

Huawei has shown resilience in the face of Washington’s chip restrictions over the last six years. In 2023, it launched the Mate 60 smartphone powered by a advanced domestically produced chip. By late 2024, Huawei launched the Mate 70, which stunned Washington. 

Here’s more color on Ascend 910D’s development via WSJ’s source:

The development is still at an early stage, and a series of tests will be needed to assess the chip’s performance and get it ready for customers, the people said.

Huawei hopes that the latest iteration of its Ascend AI processors will be more powerful than Nvidia’s H100, a popular chip used for AI training that was released in 2022, said one of the people. Previous versions are called 910B and 910C.

After the Trump administration banned H20 chips in China, Nvidia’s rivals, such as Huawei and Cambricon Technologies, have gained momentum. Huawei plans to deliver over 800,000 Ascend 910B and 910C chips this year to state-owned telecommunications carriers and AI companies, such as TikTok parent ByteDance, according to the sources.

Huawei’s development of advanced chips to rival the Nvidia H20 chip appears to be a win, but the company has encountered production woes by being cut off from the world’s largest chip foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC).

Instead of TSMC, Huawei turned to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), a domestic chipmaker that also faces restrictions on acquiring the most advanced chip-making equipment.

Research firm SemiAnalysis commented on the new chip: “Having five times as many Ascends more than offsets each GPU being only one-third the performance of an Nvidia Blackwell … the deficiencies in power are relevant but not a limiting factor in China.”

Meanwhile… 

🚨🇨🇳🇺🇸The Release of Deepseek-R2 is imminent. The US tried to kill off Huawei by launching a huge sanctions package against them in 2019 under Trump’s first term, but it failed. Huawei are about to start trials of their Ascend 910D, and mass production of 910C.

DeepSeek R2: Unit… https://t.co/nog4EzKTV8

— Barrett (@BarrettYouTube) April 28, 2025

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