U.S. restrictions and tariffs on Chinese imports may hurt American companies, particularly those that sell semiconductors to China, according to a report by The New York Times. As companies like NVIDIA brace for potential losses, possibly as high as $5.5 billion from its H20 chip, Chinese tech giant Huawei is seizing the opportunity by preparing a competing product.
Huawei readies Ascend 920 chip
Reuters reported on April 21 that Huawei has a new chip ready for Chinese companies that may be forced to seek an alternative to NVIDIA. The Ascend 920, first reported on by DigiTimes Asia, could replace NVIDIA’s H20 when it becomes available for purchase in the second half of 2025.
According to Tom’s Hardware, the Huawei Ascend 920 has 900 TFLOPs per card and a 4 TB/s memory bandwidth, making it significantly more powerful than the NVIDIA H20. The H20 is a lower-power version of NVIDIA’s H100, built for the Chinese market in accordance with U.S. restrictions. AMD also faces strict restrictions on sales to China.
Huawei competes across a wide swath of the tech world, including with Apple on smartphones and Ericsson and Nokia in telecommunications, according to The New York Times. Huawei could form a business relationship with DeepSeek, helping boost its China-based advanced AI efforts.
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Chip sanctions on China span Biden and Trump eras amid rising tech tensions
On April 15, the Trump administration restricted NVIDIA, Advanced Micro Devices, and Intel from selling chips to China. Days later, shares in all three companies fell. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang met with Chinese leaders and discussed the region’s importance to the company.
An anonymous New York Times source said China could use NVIDIA chips to build data centers as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, a soft power initiative to plant Chinese-backed infrastructure worldwide. Sanctions against NVIDIA began in 2022 under former President Joe Biden’s administration to prevent the sale of high-performance chips to China.
Now, with pressure mounting on both sides of the Pacific, the race to control the future of AI and chipmaking is as much about geopolitics as it is about silicon.