Huawei takes on Nvidia in China's AI chip market with new Ascend 910C processor

Huawei is rolling out its new Ascend 910C processor to compete with Nvidia in China's AI chip market, having begun sending samples to major Chinese server makers for testing, according to sources who spoke to the South China Morning Post. The 910C builds on the earlier 910B, and Huawei plans to offer it to large Chinese internet companies that have been key Nvidia customers. The move comes as US export restrictions limit Nvidia's ability to sell its most advanced GPUs in China. Analysts believe the 910B matches or slightly exceeds the AI performance of Nvidia's A100 GPU, and Huawei claims its Ascend chips were used to train about half of China's 70 most powerful large language models last year.