Huawei Technologies is set to unveil new AI technology this week in defiance of US export control curbs, advancing its ambition to replace Nvidia in China and compete on the global stage.<\/p>\n
Huawei\u2019s rotating chairman Wang Tao will present its upcoming Ascend 960 AI chips, to be commercially available in 2027, at the company\u2019s annual summit in Shanghai on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Some critical details that analysts will watch out for include whether the new component will be powerful enough for training frontier AI models.<\/p>\n
Huawei\u2019s goal is to ensure its Ascend chips can operate every single AI model, in China and beyond, chairman Guo Ping of the company\u2019s supervisory board told new hires at an internal meeting earlier this month.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are closing the gap by innovating chip architectures,\u201d Guo said. \u201cApple was not a leader in making processors at the beginning, but they delivered exceptional user experience through architecture redesigns and software optimization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Already, Huawei has been making inroads at home and beyond. DeepSeek is planning to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips at a data center it\u2019s building in Inner Mongolia to operate its models. Huawei is also exploring foreign markets including Malaysia and Egypt, Bloomberg News has reported.<\/p>\n
The Chinese telecom-to-smartphone firm is spearheading Beijing\u2019s drive for self-sufficiency in critical technologies in the face of years-long restrictions aimed at crippling China\u2019s chipmaking aspirations.<\/p>\n
It is also leading a Beijing-backed campaign to export the Chinese technology stack abroad at a time when the world\u2019s two superpowers are vying for geopolitical dominance everywhere.<\/p>\n
Ascend 960 will succeed Huawei\u2019s current Ascend 950 family of AI accelerators, of which the 950DT favored by DeepSeek is equipped with faster, higher-capacity memory for demanding AI inference workloads. Another upgraded iteration, Ascend 970, is already planned for 2028, the Shenzhen-based company previously announced when launching a three-year campaign to overtake Nvidia. Each new generation of chips will double the amount of computing power of its predecessor.<\/p>\n
But Huawei\u2019s AI chips are trailing Nvidia\u2019s top-notch offerings. Frontier Chinese AI labs like DeepSeek are still largely relying on the US company\u2019s chips for training their models, which they then operate using more domestic semiconductors, underscoring the challenge Beijing faces to wean itself completely off of western technology. At the same time, Nvidia\u2019s most sophisticated silicon is still finding its way into China via smuggling, albeit in modest quantities.<\/p>\n
A constraint in production capacity is also preventing Huawei from satisfying explosive demand for computing power in a market that Morgan Stanley estimates could reach 646 billion yuan ($96 billion) by 2030. Nvidia\u2019s most advanced Blackwell processors are not directly available in China. Huawei recently raised pricing for the Ascend 950DT chip by 60%, citing tight component supply in communications with customers.<\/p>\n
To overcome its disadvantages, Huawei has been trying to come up with innovative ways, including the recently announced LogicFolding technique, to improve its chip technology without the best gear.<\/p>\n
Huawei has also introduced a so-called SuperPod structure that will soon allow as many as 100,000 Ascend chips to be linked in a cluster and enables faster data transmission via its UnifiedBus networking protocol. The company says its adaptations and networking can make up for shortcomings in single-chip performance relative to the likes of Nvidia.<\/p>\n
\u201cSystem-level competitiveness matters more than ever,\u201d said Morgan Stanley analyst Charlie Chan in a recent research note. \u201cThe effective gap is narrowing through multi-die design, advanced packaging, rack-scale system architecture, optical networking, and software-hardware co-optimization,\u201d Chan wrote.<\/p>\n
Huawei is also making some progress on other fronts. Ascend 950 chips are the first Huawei AI accelerators powered by memory chips it designs in-house, though the company has provided little production details.<\/p>\n
The Shenzhen electronics giant and other Chinese AI chipmakers have been cut off from the latest AI memory products from South Korea\u2019s SK Hynix Inc. and Samsung Electronics as well as US-based Micron Technology as part of US export controls. – Bloomberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Huawei Technologies is set to unveil new AI technology this week in defiance of US export control curbs,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":627557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,1647,61,60,233,80],"class_list":["post-627556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-huawei","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-nvidia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/627557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}