Latest news with #Ascend910D
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Nvidia Warns Export Curbs Could Cost Billions
Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) warned U.S. lawmakers that tightening export restrictions could inadvertently supercharge Huawei's AI chip ambitions, potentially redrawing the global semiconductor map. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 3 Warning Signs with NVDA. At a closed-door session Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other executives told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that fresh Commerce Department restrictions on exporting the company's H20 AI server chips to Chinanow subject to license requirements under a March directivecould cost Nvidia as much as $5.5 billion in potential sales this year, even as Huawei Technologies prepares to begin mass shipments of its own Ascend 910C processor next month and has quietly approached leading Chinese tech firms to field-test its forthcoming Ascend 910D flagship chip. Those stakes are underscored by reported orders of at least $16 billion for Nvidia's H20 chips placed by Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance in the first quarter of 2025, signaling robust demand for high-performance AI accelerators even as geopolitical tensions flare. If DeepSeek R1 had been trained on Huawei chips or a future open-source Chinese model had been optimized exclusively for Huawei's architecture, that would risk creating a global market demand for Huawei chips, said a senior congressional committee staff member speaking to Reuters, capturing Capitol Hill's deep concern that U.S. export curbs could inadvertently fuel China's homegrown chip ecosystem at a critical juncture in the AI race. Against that backdrop, lawmakers probed Huang on the long-term implications of diminished U.S. market share and pressed for insight into policy tweaks that might preserve America's edge in next-generation semiconductors without ceding ground to Beijing. Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo told Reuters that Jensen met with the House Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss the strategic importance of AI as national infrastructure and the need to invest in U.S. manufacturing, reiterating the company's full-throated support for government efforts to bolster American semiconductor leadership through both policy and capital investment. In a March interview with the Financial Times, Huang had described Huawei as the single most formidable technology company in China, lamenting that U.S.-led restrictions have been done poorly even as the Chinese rival has clawed back smartphone market share and advanced its AI chip roadmap, and he committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on U.S.-made chips and electronics over the next four years as part of a broader push for onshore capacity under the CHIPS Act. Investors should note that U.S. license requirements designed to hobble Huawei could backfire by accelerating demand for Chinese chips, potentially reshaping revenue projections for Nvidia and its peers. The outcome may hinge on how swiftly Washington can fine-tune export rules without undermining domestic champions in the global AI hardware war. Investors will now watch Nvidia's early-June investor day and the Commerce Department's export license rulings for the next AI hardware catalyst. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Sign in to access your portfolio
Forbes
01-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Huawei Moves Ratchet Up Nvidia's Stakes In The AI Trade War
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a remarkable admission this week: He's fearful of Huawei. He should be, as Huawei is a formidable technology power in the world, its history of using political advantages to gain market share, and the current trade-war environment all theaten to shift the nexus of power back to China. Speaking in Washington, D.C. this week, Huang expressed concerns about China's growing technology prowess and its threat in the trade war. 'They're incredible in computing and network tech, all these central capabilities to advance AI,' Huang said. 'They have made enormous progress in the last several years.' It's a massive moment for both Nvidia and Huawei, as the two powers go head-to-head in the world's most explosive market: AI. And in the backdrop, a global trade war threatens to ratchet up the pressure. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal first reported that Huawei is working on tests of its new Ascend 910D chip, which competes somewhere between Nvidia's midrange H100 and H200 chips, which are targeted at AI applications but subject to export controls to China. Huawei plans to have samples of the chips as early as the next few weeks, said the WSJ. But this is just one element of the multi-layered threat to U.S. technology since the arrival of escalating tariffs, export controls, and the trade war, which China is using to build momentum for its technology industry with countries that feel alienated from the United States. That tactic appears to be working so far. For those in the networking industry, Huawei's recent success may be reminiscent of its rise as a power in networking technology in the early 2000s, when it methodically developed products to rival the portfolio of networking giant Cisco. Huawei gained huge market share worldwide, especially in developing nations, before the United States and some European countries moved to ban Huawei products for security reasons. AI raises those stakes even further, with its increased privacy and data security concerns, as well as its potential market size. Huawei's threat to Nvidia mirrors the threat it posed to Cisco. And with a $25 billion R&D budget, armies of well-trained engineers, and the support of the Chinese government, Huawei has enormous market power. At the heart of the tech upheaval is the U.S. administration's all-out trade war with China. In addition to the cumulative 145% tariff on imports from China, there are export restrictions on AI chips as well. Nvidia was told on April 9 that its H20 chip will be subject to licensing for export to China. That chip, which accounts for several billion dollars in revenue annually for Nvidia, was designed especially for the Chinese market due to its limited capabilities compared to other Nvidia GPUs. With the new restrictions, Nvidia is, according to its recent 8K SEC filing, taking 'up to approximately $5.5 billion of charges associated with H20 products for inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves.' AMD issued a similar statement on April 15 that it will take an $800 million charge due to restriction of its specially designed MI308 chip for the Chinese market. CEO Huang has been working overtime to set a more favorable trade policy. Earlier he apparently managed to avoid Trump restrictions on H20 chips for China in return for a pledge to manufacture chips and entire supercomputers in the U.S. over the next few years. But that appears to have been only a temporary relief from export controls. Mending the tariff troubles was a key focus for Nvidia following Huang's recent trips to Beijing and Shanghai. On April 16, Huang flew to China, where on April 17 he met with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng and DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng. According to multiple sources, the mission was to provide new avenues in the Chinese market and to improve the environment for negotiations between the U.S. and the PRC. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has also been firm on curbing any chip sales to China, and there's little sign of any break in policy. Huang has said the Trump administration should consider revising the regulations of AI export controls. Increased U.S. export restrictions on AI chips to China are pushing the Chinese market toward domestic providers such as Huawei—but they could also have the knock-on effect of pushing the rest of the world to look at Chinese technology. In general, Huang's comments show Nvidia is increasingly concerned about the impact the trade war will have on its business, as is the stock market. Nvidia shares are down 24% in the past six months. A pivotal moment came with the release in January of new AI models from Chinese company DeepSeek, which shows that the prices of AI technology are dropping and China is stepping up its competition. Recent AI chip controls and Huawei's expanding influence contribute to the problem. Meanwhile, U.S. tariffs and export restrictions imposed by the Trump administration are snarling technology supply chains, threatening production, and forcing a dramatic shift in plans for a range of U.S. companies. Tariffs are among several factors contributing to the recent selloff in technology stocks. The longer that proposed tariff policies go without negotiated settlements, the bigger the trouble for technology and other businesses. Without clear insight into the longer-term path of trade deals, executives will have trouble sourcing components, planning budgets, and figuring out where to build manufacturing facilities. Apple, one of the largest companies most under threat of the trade war—in addition to Nvidia —has responded by saying it will shift the bulk of its production to India from China. Apple's problems may be more treatable than Nvidia's, because its challenges are more rooted in the supply side rather than the demand side. Apple can move production out of China but realizes the bulk of revenue elsewhere. Nvidia's challenges are more complex and highlighted by potential competition from Huawei. If geopolitical tension drives more countries away from the U.S., Huawei can benefit by finding new customers. While at this point the ultimate impacts of export controls and the trade war on Nvidia's overall business are difficult to quantify, the recent trend shows a gathering wave of concerns. This appears to present the largest opportunity to Huawei since the Western embargo of its telecommunications business. It's now emerging as one of Nvidia's chief rivals in the AI chip business. Like most industry research and analyst firms, Futuriom provides paid research and marketing services to technology companies. These services include subscription research, custom research, and report sponsorships. Of the companies mentioned in this article, Futuriom has had a small paid relationship with NVIDIA in the past 12 months. Individuals from some of the companies mentioned may subscribe to our premium research service, Cloud Tracker Pro.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Huawei Ascend AI 910D processor designed to take on Nvidia's Blackwell and Rubin GPUs
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Huawei's next-generation HiSilicon Ascend 910D AI processor is expected to offer better performance than Nvidia's H100, reports Reuters. The new processor will be slower on a chip vs chip basis compared to Nvidia's Blackwell B200 and Blackwell Ultra B300 GPUs, never mind the next-generation Rubin GPUs slated to launch next year. However, Huawei's approach of building pods with hundreds of processors should allow the Ascend 910D to compete against pods based on Nvidia's current Blackwell and upcoming Rubin GPUs. Huawei is preparing to start tests of its most advanced artificial intelligence processor, the Ascend 910D, with the performance goal of surpassing Nvidia's H100 and offering a domestic alternative amid U.S. export restrictions. According to sources, Huawei has approached several local companies to assess whether the new Ascend 910D chip meets performance and deployment requirements. Initial samples are expected by late May. Separately, Huawei plans to start large-scale shipments of its dual-chiplet Ascend 910C AI processors to Chinese customers (and probably full systems based on the chips) as early as next month. The majority of of these processors were reportedly produced by TSMC for a third-party company. It remains to be seen whether the Ascend 910D will be made by China-based SMIC, or whether — nearly five years after the U.S. government restricted Huawei's access to leading-edge semiconductor production capabilities — Huawei will once again find a way to circumvent U.S. sanctions. Reaching Nvidia H100 performance levels won't be easy for Huawei. The company's latest dual-chiplet Ascend 910C offers around 780 BF16 TFLOPS of performance, whereas Nvidia's H100 can deliver around 2,000 BF16 TFLOPS. In order to achieve H100 performance levels, Huawei will have to redesign the internal architecture of the Ascend 910D and possibly increase the number of compute chiplets. To stay competitive in the AI industry next year, Huawei will have to achieve performance comparable to that of AI clusters developed in the U.S. This year, the company introduced its CloudMatrix 384 system with 384 Ascend 910C processors. It can reportedly beat Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 in certain workloads, but at the cost of significantly higher power consumption due to dramatically lower performance-per-watt. It also has over five times as many 'AI processors' as an NVL72 rack. Whether the interconnect can scale well to the required number of processors remains to be seen. Without access to leading-edge process technologies, it will become significantly more difficult for Huawei to maintain competitive positions next year. Nvidia is on-track to introduce its codenamed Rubin GPUs for AI and HPC in 2026. Rubin GPUs are set to be made on TSMC's N3 (or a more advanced) fabrication process, and they should offer even higher performance-per-watt than the current-generation Blackwell GPUs. Rubin GPUs are slated to offer around 8,300 TFLOPS of FP8 training performance, and presumably half that for BF16 — about twice the performance of the B200. Huawei's Ascend 910D and next-generation CloudMatrix systems with 384 of such processors could theoretically offer competitive AI performance on the rack level. However, it remains to be seen what performance benefits Huawei's Ascend 910D and Nvidia's Rubin GPUs will offer compared to existing offerings. Also, it should be noted that Nvidia will barely be able to sell its high-performance Rubin GPUs in China, so for that market Huawei won't really have a direct competitor. Regardless of performance or efficiency, Huawei's Ascend 910D processors will likely become China's workhorses when it comes to AI training in the coming years. Given the strategic importance of AI, the power consumption of the Ascend 910D (or any other domestic AI processor) will not be a limiting factor, as the number of deployed units could offset the efficiency of Nvidia's (or AMD, Intel, Broadcom, etc.) AI processors. The main limiting factor for China will be its ability to produce enough processors — either domestically, or overseas using proxy companies.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Nvidia under pressure on reports of Huawei chip: What to know
Nvidia (NVDA) faces pressure as Chinese competitor Huawei reportedly develops a new artificial intelligence (AI) chip, the Ascend 910D, potentially surpassing Nvidia's H100. Yahoo Finance Technology Editor Dan Howley joins Asking for a Trend to discuss the growing AI competition between the US and China. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here. Meanwhile, Nvidia under pressure as China's Huawei reportedly readies an AI chip after Trump's export ban for more on what this means for the AI race between the US and China. Let's get right to Yahoo Finances Dan Howley, Dan. That's right. Nvidia kind of on its heels here when it comes to China, although I'll give a little caveat there in a second. Uh, Huawei reportedly working on a new chip called the Ascend 910D. Uh, it's the follow-up to the Ascend 910 B and C. This according to the Wall Street Journal. Uh, the the chip is supposedly supposed to be more advanced than Nvidia's H100. Now, the H100, not exactly Nvidia's latest and greatest chip, a few years old at this point. That's from the Hopper generation. Uh, they're currently in Blackwell and they already announced Blackwell Ultra and then, uh, the chips after that. Uh, but the important thing here though is that it proves that Huawei, if if these, uh, you know, estimates are are correct and that it actually does surpass the H100, it would prove that Huawei is pushing forward with their own capabilities without the help of US technologies, uh, like Nvidia's. And so, uh, the caveat being here that Nvidia really doesn't sell much in China and can't sell much in China anymore now that, uh, the White House has basically said, look, the H20 that you built specifically for the Chinese market, uh, it it's going to be under export restrictions. Uh, and so more or less it's it's banned from being sold. Uh, China did make up a good chunk of revenue for Nvidia in its prior quarter. And now they're saying they're going to have to pay back 5.5 billion as far as charges go related to some of the chips that they were expected to ship out to the country. But it it this chip is important for Huawei, but it doesn't say that the Nvidia is falling behind. Uh, it's showing that there's another alternative available to Chinese market customers. Uh, and so this kind of back and forth between the US over which is going to win the the AI wars kind of continues on now. Uh, the US was trying to push China away, uh, kind of leaving them, uh, in in the dark as far as the technologies go, so that the US could maintain its its stance as the the number one AI power. But China clearly showing that it's not going to kind of sit back and let that happen. Here's a broader policy question for you, my friend, which is, so the Chinese government would obviously like to be a global tech powerhouse. The US government would prefer they not be. And so we impose these export controls which which some believe, listen, the CCP is an adversary and we've got to try to move these levers. Um, others argue what it's doing, perhaps, is encouraging Chinese companies like the Huaweis to get more creative, to get more dynamic and innovative. I'm I'm just curious your your thoughts on that. Yeah, that seems to be the the the takeaway that uh, has kind of become the the go-to since uh, we've seen deep seek R1 and V3 models that were developed using Nvidia's technology, earlier technology, the H20s. Uh, you know, those chips are not top of the line, top of the line, but they managed to produce models that uh, were up there with what Open AI has to offer built using the the latest and greatest. So it really is a matter of, okay, they're going to find a way of uh, researchers in China that they're, you know, obviously, they're motivated to make, you know, the latest and greatest models as well, uh, prove that they can be as much of a powerhouse in AI as the US. And that appears to be exactly, uh, what they're doing, uh, and, you know, regardless of uh, what the US tries to do with stopping different types of technologies from flowing there, uh, it seems to be that China will do what it has to do to be an AI powerhouse. Dan, great to see you. Thank you, my friend.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Huawei aims to take on Nvidia's H100 with new AI chip
Chinese tech conglomerate Huawei is looking to take on semiconductor behemoth Nvidia with a new advanced AI chip. Huawei is making progress developing its latest Ascend AI GPU, the Ascend 910D, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar. The company has been reaching out to other Chinese firms to find test partners, the Wall Street Journal reports, and hopes that its chip will rival Nvidia's H100 series, which is popular for training AI models. The development comes just a few weeks after the U.S. imposed further restrictions on the export of certain AI chips to China. If Huawei is successful, it could help fill a void in the Chinese AI market left by increased chip export controls in the U.S. TechCrunch has reached out to Huawei for comment and will update this post if we hear back. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at
