Huawei’s new AI chip, the 910C GPU, is shipping to Chinese customers as early as next month, according to reports.
The chip fills a gap in the market for China’s booming AI industry, since the US has repeatedly banned Nvidia from selling its chips without an export license.
It’s good news for Chinese AI companies, since they have a strong need for domestic alternatives to this key component in AI hardware.
What to Know About the 910C Chip
Huawei Technologies’ 910C artificial intelligence chip stands as “an architectural evolution rather than a technological breakthrough,” according to a report from Reuters.
In other words: The chip works by bundling two of Huawei’s 910B processors together. The company’s Ascend 910B graphics processing unit (GPU) chip was already available on the market, so this new chip isn’t a completely new technology
However, it’s a big upgrade from a single 910B chip, and offers a performance comparable to the Nvidia H100 chip.
The Huawei 910C Chip: Specs
If listing all the numbers of various chips doesn’t help you gauge what to expect from this new one, however, here’s a list of the ways the 910C chip builds on Huawei’s previous models:
- Double the computing power of the 910B
- Double the memory capacity of the 910B
- Enhanced support for “diverse AI workload data”
- Other, unspecified “incremental” improvements
Purely for this chip’s status as the domestic alternative to Nvidia’s now-banned products, however, it’s pretty safe to say that Huawei’s latest chip will be a bestseller within China.
How Nvidia’s Chip Bans Paved the Way
The US has been keeping AI chips away from China for years now. The process started back in October 2022 with the Biden administration, which moved to block exports of the Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs — the most powerful processor offered by the company at that time.
Later that same year, Nvidia released the less-powerful A800 chip to meet the China sales requirements. This chip was blocked in late 2023. Nvidia’s next attempt, the H20 chip, met the new, more strict requirements. At least, it did until this month, when the Trump administration blocked exports of that chip, too.
With Nvidia frozen out, Huawei’s path towards dominating the Chinese AI chip market seems clear.
Source: https://tech.co/
