Huawei has unveiled its next-generation AI chip, the Ascend 920, days after Nvidia revealed the Trump administration had opted to impose further export restrictions on its H20 GPUs.
According to a report from DigiTimes Asia, mass production of the Ascend 920 is expected to commence in the second half of 2025.
The Ascend 920 was launched by Huawei at a partner conference earlier this month. Per a report from Tom’s Hardware, the chip will be produced using the 6nm process node and is expected to offer more than 900 teraflops (BF16 performance) per card, whilst boasting 4Tbps of memory bandwidth.
DCD has reached out to Huawei for more information about the Ascend 920.
The news outlet also reported that Huawei launched its AI CloudMatrix CM384 solution at the conference. The offering is reportedly comprised of 384 Ascend 910C processors across 16 racks, with 12 racks containing compute, and four housing the networking.
While Huawei’s CM384 claims to offer 300 petaflops of BF16 compared to the 180 petaflops of BF16 provided by Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 – a custom 16-bit floating point format for machine learning – it uses almost four times the power.
Earlier this month, Nvidia revealed that the US government would now require the company to obtain a license to export its H20 to China, which the GPU giant said would result in approximately $5.5 billion of charges associated with H20 products for inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves during its first financial quarter.
First announced in 2023, Nvidia’s H20 GPUs are a less sophisticated version of its H100 processors and were designed specifically for the Chinese market in compliance with US export controls.
Huawei to start shipping Ascend 910C chips to Chinese customers next month
Following the launch of the Ascend 920, Reuters published a report stating Huawei plans to start mass shipping its Ascend 910C AI chip – the Ascend 920’s predecessor – to Chinese customers from May. Citing people familiar with the news, Reuters further noted the Ascend 910C delivers approximately 60 percent of the inference performance of the Nvidia H100 by combining two 910B processors into a single package.
While it is unclear who is producing Huawei’s 910C chips, in November 2024, the US government opened an investigation into TSMC after it received notification that a customer had placed an order with the company for a chip that resembled Huawei’s Ascend 910B.
Following the opening of the investigation, TSMC announced it would stop making AI chips using its advanced process nodes of 7nm or smaller for Chinese customers.
TSMC previously produced the chip’s predecessor for Huawei but has not worked with the company since US sanctions came into force in 2020. It has been noted that there is no suggestion TSMC willfully or maliciously violated US sanctions.
