Chinese technology giant Huawei is seeking to shift its chip design strategy in order to steal local market share away from NVIDIA, suggests a report from The Information. Despite US sanctions on China, which prevent NVIDIA from selling its advanced AI chips in the country, NVIDIA's products remain the most widely demanded GPUs, so much so that the Trump administration has considered sanctioning Malaysia and Thailand in order to close another route through which China can acquire NVIDIA's chips.
Huawei Aims To Shift From ASICs To General Purpose Chips In Bid To Compete With NVIDIA, Says Report
Multiple reports have suggested that one major bottleneck that Huawei has faced when it comes to ensuring market penetration of its chips in the domestic Chinese market is the lack of adoption of its CANN programming language. CANN has reportedly failed to take off in the market, and according to The Information's sources, new chip software is at the heart of Huawei's attempt to revitalize its Chinese AI chip business.
According to the details, Huawei's new chips will feature software that will allow users to work with NVIDIA's Cuda programming language through an intermediary software that converts the instructions from Cuda to language applicable to Huawei's chips. The sources added that Huawei is also interested in adopting the chip functionality model used by NVIDIA and AMD.
According to The Information, while Huawei's current chips are application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), the firm is interested in expanding its products for general-purpose computing. The shift would allow for a much broader use of Huawei's AI GPUs and potentially help the firm increase its Chinese market share.
However, designing the chips will only be one part of the process. Even if Huawei is assured of a steady supply of advanced chip design equipment, the firm will have to turn to China's SMIC for chip manufacturing. SMIC is already sanctioned by the US government from acquiring advanced chip manufacturing machines which has limited its ability to manufacture chips with technologies more advanced than the 7-nanometer chip manufacturing process.
While Huawei might be able to overcome the chip design equipment gap by relying on domestically manufactured Chinese machines, SMIC should find it more difficult to overcome the manufacturing technology constraints. However, Chinese firms, such as Alibaba and Tencent, might have no choice but to eventually use Huawei's products as they gain parity with the NVIDIA chips that the software companies currently possess.
About the author: Ramish is a seasoned technology writer and editor with more than a decade of experience. He specializes in semiconductor fabrication and market analysis. With a background in finance and supply chain management - via his bachelors in Finance and a micromasters in supply chain management from MIT - Ramish combines financial rigor with deep industry insight to deliver accurate and authoritative coverage.
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