SINGAPORE/BEIJING, April 21 – Huawei Technologies (HWT.UL) plans to start mass shipments of its superior 910C artificial intelligence chip to Chinese clients as early as next month, two people acquainted with the matter stated.
Some shipments have already been made, they stated.
The timing is fortuitous for Chinese AI enterprises that have been left scrambling for domestic options to the H20, the main, one AI chip that Nvidia (NVDA.O) had till these days been allowed to sell freely in the Chinese market.
This month, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration told Nvidia that sales of the H20 might need an export license.
Huawei’s 910C, a graphics processing unit (GPU), describes an architectural development other than a technological improvement, consistent with one of the two people and a third source acquainted with its design.
It accomplishes performance com[parable to Nvidia’s H100 chip by combining two – 910B processors in a single package by improved blending strategies, they stated.
That mean it has double the computing power and memory potential of the 910B and it also has incremental enhancements, consisting of more suitable help for numerous AI workload data, they added.
All assets have been no authorized to talk to media and declined to be recognized. Huawei declined to comment on what it called hypothesis about shipment plans for the 910C and its capabilities.
Seeking to restriction China’s technological development, specially improves for its military, Washington has cut China off from Nvidia’s most superior AI products which include its flagship B200 chip.
The H100 chip, as an example, was banned from sale in China in 2022 by U.S. Government before it was even release.
This has allowed Huawei and Chinese GPU startups which includes Moore Threads and Iluvatar CoreX to go after what has mainly been a marketplace dominated by Nvidia.
The U.S. Commerce Department’s latest export curbs on Nvidia’s H20 “will imply that Huawei’s Ascend 910C GPU will now come to be the hardware of preference for (Chinese) AI model developers and for deploying inference capability,” stated Paul Triolo, a partner at consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group.
Late last year, Huawei allotted samples of the 910C to numerous technology companies and began accepting orders, sources have said.
Reuters was now not capable of verify which enterprises might be primarily manufacturing the 910C.
China’s SMIC (0981.HK) is production a few main components of the GPUs using of its N+2 7nm procedure technology despite its chip yield rates are low, a source has earlier stated.
At least a number of Huawei’s 910C GPUs use semiconductors that have been made by TSMC ( (2330.TW), for China-based Sophgo, according to one of the sources and a fourth person.
The Commerce Department has been investigating work accomplished by the Taiwanese contract chip manufacturing large for Sophgo after one of its TSMC-made chips was discovered in a 910B processor.
TSMC made almost 3 million chips in latest years that matched the design ordered through Sophgo, consistent with Lennart Heim, a researcher at RAND’s Technology and Security and Policy Center in Arlington, Virginia, who’s monitoring Chinese development in AI.
Huawei reiterated that it has not used TSMC-made Sophgo chips. Sophgo did not immediately without delay respond to a request for remark.
TSMC stated it complies with regulatory necessities and it has not supplied Huawei since mid-September 2020.
