Well, if DeepSeek wasn't enough, it seems like we might see a massive AI hardware breakthrough from China, as Huawei's next AI chip might disrupt the competition coming from NVIDIA.
Huawei's Next AI Chip Is Said To Debut Right Alongside NVIDIA's GTC Keynote; China Ready To Compete At Hardware Level Now
The AI race is up and running, and in recent days, we have seen the balance tilt massively towards China, especially after DeepSeek's R1 AI model. Despite a challenging round of regulations and sanctions by the US, China has made surprising progress in the industry, not only introducing an in-house model capable of rivaling OpenAI's o1 but also with newer methods and techniques. To top it off, the Chinese AI segment is now focused on improving hardware computational capabilities, and the Ascend 910C from Huawei might kick-start this bandwagon as well.
We recently reported on how DeepSeek utilized chips from Huawei for inferencing workloads. Now, Chinese media sources are claiming that Huawei's upcoming Ascend 910C AI chip offers competitive performance compared with NVIDIA's H100. The 910C has reached a 60% equivalence to Team Green's flagship Hopper AI accelerator, with inference tasks giving great output. It is argued that firms like DeepSeek have several advantages in utilizing a compute portfolio around Huawei's chips, and that's what we'll discuss next.
It is claimed that Huawei's Ascend 910C is a complete "in-house" product, reportedly employing SMIC's 7nm process, along with 53 billion transistors. Moreover, Huawei has managed to bring support for DeepSeek's AI models since day one and even supports cross-compatibility with compute stacks like NVIDIA's CUDA, making it easier for developers to work on them. However, computational power isn't everything that matters since Huawei needs to establish the right software stack if it is eager to dethrone the CUDA ecosystem dominance.
Interestingly, it is claimed (via @Jukanlosreve) that Huawei's Ascend 910C might be unveiled alongside NVIDIA's GTC 2025 keynote, which will feature next-gen architectures from Team Green. This is said to be China's response to NVIDIA's growing computational capabilities, and if Huawei manages to nail the release, it could possibly trigger a negative retail reaction.
On our sell-off statement, it seems like NVIDIA is now witnessing a far more significant impact when its revenue streams are narrowed down. We recently discussed how the US is eager to patch trade loopholes in nations like Singapore, which accounts for 20% of NVIDIA's revenue. Additionally, the Trump administration is considering further regulating the sale of Team Green's AI chips to hostile nations, which will impact NVIDIA's quarterly revenue, ultimately creating the cascading effect on the stock market which we saw a few days ago.
China has evolved tremendously, and the nation is a statement that US regulations haven't brought domestic industries down; rather, they have fueled in-house innovation, which we are seeing in the form of DeepSeek and Huawei.
