- US Bans NVIDIA’s H20 just like Huawei reveals his chip ai 920 Ascend 920
- Ascend 920 can fill the post-gap restrictions from China to the AI china chip
- Nvidia faces $ 5.5 billion in blows while Huawei takes the opportunity
On April 9, 2025, the United States announced its intention to further strengthen the exports of ia fleas to China, in particular the H20 processor of NVIDIA, a reduced performance chip that the company created to comply with previous American export regulations while continuing sales in China.
Huawei, who has been positioning himself as China’s response to Nvidia for some time, was probably waiting for the announcement because a day later, at a partner conference, he revealed ascend 920, his new generation AI chip.
Set to enter mass production in the second half of 2025, according to Digitimes AsiaThe chip should be built on the 6 nm process of minimum wage and offer up to 900 BF16 and 4000 GB / s of memory bandwidth, supported by HBM3 memory modules. It will also support PCIe 5.0 interconnection protocols and new generation to facilitate large model training.
An effective alternative
With the NVIDI H20 now limited in China, industry analysts think that the new Huawei chip could fill the gap.
Although the real references are not yet available, the ascend’s specifications of the 920s suggest that it could be an effective alternative to the Nvidia H20 and can be welcomed by Chinese companies like Tencent and Bytedance, which will now require substitutes for the limited chip.
While the current ATCA 910C should offer around 60% of the NVIDIA H100 inference performance, Ascend 920 would improve training efficiency from 30% to 40% and is adapted to the transformer and the mixture of expert models.
Nvidia had made solid sales in China via the H20, sales would have increased by 50% in the quarter before the ban. The new license requirement of the American Department of Commerce actually interrupts these sales, and Nvidia should result 5.5 billion dollars in business loss.
Huawei also announced its AI Cloudmatrix 384 supernod solution during the same event.
This Rack scale platform, described as a “nuclear product”, would apparently go beyond the performance of the GB 200 of Nvidia but consumes more power, which is not considered a major concern in China compared to the West.
