According to several market analysts, China’s stockpile of Nvidia H20 artificial intelligence ( AI ) processors is likely to run out in about a year given that the Trump administration has prohibited sales to Chinese customers.
Huawei, a Chinese tech company, therefore, had increase production of its fresh Ascend 910C solution as quickly as possible while other Chinese AI device designers make more effort to avoid a chip shortage in the years to come.
According to several sources, Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, and another Chinese companies placed orders for H20 processors for between US$ 12 billion and US$ 16 billion, or even more, in the first quarter of this year. At least one million of the cards apparently arrived before the shipping were stopped.
An unnamed Chinese business executive told Japan’s Nikkei Asia news that the new US punishment “didn’t come as a surprise because it was commonly anticipated across the market.”
Every big Chinese tech firm had prepared H20 stocks in advance. After all, it wasn’t banned at the time, so why not, given its impressive efficiency?
The US has placed a cap on the performance of AI processors that can be exported to China for the next time, and it was then lifted after new, down-to-earth versions turned out to be bestsellers.
The Da Vinci style infrastructure, which was introduced in 2018 as a platform for AI processing and a replacement for Nvidia in data centers, cloud, edge devices, and other programs, is where Huawei’s Ascend collection of AI processors came from. The Ascend 910 computer was introduced the year before.
After the US ordered Taiwan’s TSMC to stop providing Huawei with device casting service, the Ascend 910B was released in 2022. The Nvidia A100, which was released two years earlier, is rated as performing about 20 % below the H100 if it is produced in China by SMIC using non-sanctioned 7nm DUV printing. In 2022, imports of those two Nvidia bits were halted.
Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, speech recognition provider iFLYTEK, AI application provider SenseTime, regional universities and nationwide facilities, as well as Huawei itself, officially adopt the 910B.
Within the next few weeks, large shipments of the Ascend 910C are anticipated to started. The growth was revealed final August. It is the most cutting-edge Foreign solution to Nvidia, which is already being used by China’s DeepSeek, DeepSeek.
Similar to Nvidia’s cutting-edge Blackwell computer’s structure, the 910C consists of two 910B cards connected in a single package. The 910C performs well on its own, exceeding the H20 and coming close to the H100.
The 910C, which is used in Huawei’s fresh CloudMatrix 394 rack-scale AI data center answer, a complete system that includes 384 Ascend 910C processors, servers, marketing, store, energy management, and cooling, is more impressive.
The CloudMatrix 394″ competes immediately” with Nvidia’s premium GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip, according to scientist Dylan Patel and his SemiAnalysis colleagues.
With technology at the pedal, networking, optics, and technology layers, Huawei is a technology behind in chips, but its scale-up solution is probably a generation back of Nvidia and AMD’s current products on the market, according to them.
Huawei’s solution uses significantly more electricity than Nvidia’s, but according to the report,” the power imbalances are a relevant but not a limiting factor in China.” Although this is the best thing China can do right now under the current US sanctions, that won’t always be the case.
SemiAnalysis points out that Huawei still relies on imported Samsung for its high-bandwidth memory ( HBM ) and that its AI processors are produced using imported machinery. However, attention is also being paid to those two flaws.
Hyundai Motor Securities, a Korean stockbroker, reports that Chinese DRAM manufacturer CXMT is “targeting deployment in Huawei’s Ascend AI chips within two to three years.”
In addition, China’s semiconductor equipment and materials industry has advanced to the point where, in spite of US sanctions, SMIC and other foundries, as well as CXMT and other Chinese memory chip makers, can upgrade their process technology and increase capacity.
Naura, China’s largest producer of semiconductor production equipment, is now rated by some as being in the top ten on the global scene.
Ascend 910C yields remain low, but they are rising, indicating that SMIC’s production capacity could reach 400, 000 chips per month later this year, according to industry sources. Additionally, Huawei has already revealed that the Ascend 920, which will be made using SMIC’s 6nm process, will be 30 % to 40 % more effective than the 910C.
The US sanctions ‘ failure to enact a ban on China from using AI processors are demonstrated by the 910C production estimate and Ascend 920 specifications. As for Nvidia, if those restrictions are not lifted, it will likely see its once dominating share of the Chinese market disappear.
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