Nvidia is no longer allowed to sell its popular AI chips to China. The competition announced an alternative one day later. Huawei’s new AI chip Ascend 920 has great potential to be very successful.
Already under the Biden administration, the U.S. significantly restricted the export of AI products and technologies. Only close allies were supposed to receive such products.
Under Trump, the restrictions were further tightened: On April 9, 2025, the United States announced plans to further tighten export restrictions on AI chips to China. This also includes Nvidia’s H20 processor (in the title image), which Nvidia specifically developed a chip for China to circumvent previous restrictions.
According to analysts, Nvidia is said to have made a lot of money with the H20 chips, but the new requirements of the U.S. Department of Commerce are expected to halt sales to China. Experts estimate that Nvidia will have to write off $5.5 billion because of this.
Huawei introduces its fastest AI chip one day later that is supposed to compete with Nvidia
How does the competition respond? Huawei, a Chinese technology company that has long been mentioned as China’s answer to Nvidia, presented its new AI chip one day after the announcement of the new restrictions: the Ascend 920. The current fastest chip from Huawei is the Ascend 910C.
According to DigiTimes Asia, the chip is expected to go into mass production in the second half of 2025:
- It is expected to be based on the 6nm process from SMIC, a Chinese semiconductor manufacturer, and to offer up to 900 TFLOPs of BF16 computing power and 4000 GB/s of memory bandwidth, supported by HBM3 memory modules.
- It will also support PCIe 5.0 and the next generation of connection protocols to facilitate the training of large AI and language models.
How fast is the chip? So far, there are no independent benchmarks. However, the specifications of the chip suggest that the Ascend 920 could be an effective alternative to Nvidia’s H20. Chinese companies like Tencent and ByteDance might welcome it, as they now need a replacement for the restricted chip.
The previous chip from Huawei, the Ascend 910C, is expected to reach about 60% of the performance of Nvidia’s old H100. In contrast, the new Ascend 920 is said to be 30 to 40% faster than the previous model and is also designed for AI models.
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