Huawei set to unveil China’s best answer to Nvidia AI chip reign

Beijing – Huawei Technologies is set to unveil its upcoming Ascend 960 AI chips at its annual summit in Shanghai on September 17th, despite US export control curbs. Ascend 960 will succeed the company's current Ascend 950 family of AI accelerators, with each new generation of chips aimed at doubling the computing power of its predecessor.

Huawei's goal is to ensure that its Ascend chips can operate every AI model, both in China and internationally. Some analysts will be closely watching the new component's performance, particularly in training frontier AI models. Huawei's Chairman Guo Ping emphasized the company's commitment to innovating chip architectures to close the gap with Nvidia, who currently holds the top position in the market.

Huawei has already made strides in China and beyond, including deploying at least 160,000 Ascend 950DT chips in a data center in Inner Mongolia to operate AI models, and exploring markets such as Malaysia and Egypt. The Chinese firm is leading Beijing's drive for self-sufficiency in critical technologies amid years-long US restrictions aimed at limiting China's chipmaking aspirations.

Ascend 960 builds upon the Ascend 950 family, with the 950DT favored by DeepSeek featuring faster, higher-capacity memory for demanding AI inference workloads. Another upgraded iteration, Ascend 970, is slated for release in 2028. However, Huawei's AI chips still lag behind Nvidia's top offerings. While Huawei's chips are being used for model training, they are ultimately operated using domestic semiconductors.

Nvidia's most advanced silicon, the Blackwell processors, remain inaccessible in China. To overcome these limitations, Huawei has introduced innovations like the LogicFolding technique and a SuperPod structure that enables the linking of up to 100,000 Ascend chips in a cluster. These adaptations and networking protocols aim to compensate for the shortcomings in single-chip performance compared to Nvidia's offerings.

Morgan Stanley analyst Charlie Chan highlighted that system-level competitiveness, including multi-die design, advanced packaging, rack-scale system architecture, optical networking, and software-hardware co-optimisation, is becoming increasingly important. Despite these challenges, Huawei continues to make progress, with Ascend 950 chips being the first in the company's line powered by in-house-designed memory chips.