NVIDIA’s Dominance In ADAS Chips Under Threat From Chinese OEMs, Huawei’s HiSilicon All Set To Announce A Breakthrough Development

NVIDIA's DRIVE Orin System-on-a-Chip (Soc) is currently a major player in the increasingly vibrant Chinese auto market, enabling a host of OEMs to deploy tailored Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs) for smart mobility. Yet, this dominance is now under threat from domestic competition. Meanwhile, Huawei's dedicated chip design unit, HiSilicon, is gearing up to announce some breakthroughs at its upcoming Connectivity Conference, which can potentially work towards chipping away NVIDIA's dominance in China's AI sphere.

NVIDIA's DRIVE Orin SoC Now Faces A Number Of Upstart Competitors

For the benefit of those who might not be aware, NVIDIA's DRIVE Orin is a compute powerhouse for smart mobility, capable of performing 254 Trillion Operations Per Second (TOPS) that enable efficient processing of data from an array of sensors, including cameras, ultrasound, and LiDARs.

While Tesla's FSD chips currently top the sale charts in China, these chips are exclusively consumed by Tesla itself for its domestic sales. This leaves the DRIVE Orin as the only viable non-domestic option for a growing number of Chinese OEMs.

Now, however, this dominance is under a threat from growing domestic competition. For instance, in December 2023, NIO unveiled the Shenji NX9031, its first in-house ADAS chip that uses a 5nm process and offers a compute power of a whopping 1,016 TOPS, with deliveries expected to commence in the first quarter of 2025.

Do Note that NVIDIA's DRIVE Thor SoC offers 2,000 TOPS in compute power and is expected to be commercially available in 2025.

Meanwhile, XPeng and Li Auto are also developing their custom smart mobility chip solutions. Bear in mind that NIO, XPeng, and Li Auto together account for ~90 percent of NVIDIA's DRIVE Orin sales in China, according to the Gaogong Industry Research’s Smart Auto Research Institute.

Black Sesame Intelligence is also gearing up to launch its next-gen ADAS SoC, the Huashan A2000, which uses a 7nm node process and offers compute power of 250+ TOPS.

Finally, Horizon Robotics will launch its Journey 6 series of ADAS-focused SoC later this year, with its top-end variant offering a compute power of 560 TOPS. BYD is among Horizon Robotics' most prominent customers.

Huawei's HiSilicon All Set For A Major Announcement

At the other end of the spectrum, Huawei's chip design arm, HiSilicon, is reportedly gearing up for a major announcement at its upcoming HiSilicon Full Connectivity Conference on the 09th and the 10th of September. DigiTimes is reporting that the event will announce a major chip-related development. The publication notes that, given the major buzz around this event, it is likely to feature the announcement of a breakthrough.

We recently reported that Huawei's HiSilicon was planning to challenge NVIDIA's uncontested supremacy in the AI sphere by launching the Ascend 910C, a chip that reportedly rivals NVIDIA's H100 GPU in performance. It is not unreasonable to infer that we might finally get the first glance at this breakthrough chip during the HiSilicon event in September.

Given the fact that NVIDIA is on course to earn $12 billion in revenue from China this year, the ramifications of this onslaught of competition can be severe for the stock's bullish thesis.

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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