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Huawei's Ascend 910C chips are apparently good enough to give NVIDIA's H100 GPUs a run for their money, as per the publicized claims of China's star AI player. And, judging from the beating - albeit fleeting - that NVIDIA's shares received in the aftermath of this well-choreographed move from Huawei, the market seems to agree. Now, one analyst has made some startling claims regarding Huawei's Ascend series chips, and that too within a note dedicated to NVIDIA.
To wit, Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh, while expounding on his bullish thesis for NVIDIA, took a startling detour to discuss the dynamics surrounding Huawei's Ascend 910 series chips:
"In China, we estimate Ascend 910a/b/c potentially at 700k+ units in 2025E but yields at key foundry SMIC remain fairly low, we estimate ~30%."
For the benefit of those who might not be aware, Huawei's 910C GPU has already been dubbed China's DeepSeek moment for its still-fledgling semiconductor sphere. As we detailed in a previous post, the Ascend 910C combines two older 910B chips to reportedly deliver 800 TFLOP/s of computing power at FP16, replete with a memory bandwidth of up to 3.2 TB/s. The chip is considered on par with NVIDIA's H100 GPU, and is expected to start hitting the proverbial shelves in China soon now that volume production is underway at China's largest contract chip manufacturer, SMIC.
Do note, however, that Huawei's Ascend 910C chips leverage SMIC's 7nm DUV-based production process, which suffers from "fairly low" yields, as recently pointed out by Mizuho's Rakesh as well.
Of course, Huawei continues to expand its own chip fabrication footprint in China, with a recent report identifying as many as 11 different foundries now working under Huawei's control. Interestingly, many of these foundries bear discrete names to obfuscate their connection to the Chinese giant, which appears to be on a quest to attain an unprecedented level of vertical integration.
And, based on separate reports, it appears Huawei is also collaborating with SiCarrier to develop next-gen lithography machines. If these efforts attain commercial success, SiCarrier will become China's ASML, and allow the world's second-largest economy to break free of Washington's ever-tightening noose around its chips sector.
As an illustration, consider the fact that the Trump administration recently imposed licensing requirements on NVIDIA's China-specific GPUs, the H20, and AMD's comparable offering, the MI308. What's more, the administration has also issued new guidance, which posits that the use of Huawei's Ascend 910 series chips anywhere in the world would violate US export controls. This move is intended to preclude Huawei's penetration overseas.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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