Nvidia boss: "Huawei is formidable technology company"

The AI accelerators from Chinese company Huawei could be faster than previously assumed. According to Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, Huawei's accelerators achieve the AI computing power of Nvidia's H200 from the Hopper series. This would put Huawei just one generation behind, although the Chinese company only has limited access to chip manufacturing technology.

In an interview with Bloomberg after the announcement of the latest business figures, the Nvidia boss described Huawei as a "formidable technology company" that is "looking for ways to compete". Nvidia has a lot of data to support these assumptions.

Three chip sources

Huawei's fastest AI accelerator is called Ascend 910C. It is assumed that some of the compute chiplets used there are manufactured by the Chinese chip contract manufacturer SMIC using 7-nanometer technology. However, some of these chiplets are also said to come from the global market leader TSMC via mid-tier companies. Officially, TSMC is no longer allowed to supply Huawei due to export restrictions. Reports have also recently emerged that Huawei is now producing chips itself.

In the interview, Huang also discussed Huawei's cloud matrix system. He admits that with 384 AI accelerators, it scales even higher than Nvidia's server offerings, such as the current GB200 NVL72. Huawei makes up for the per-chip disadvantage with sheer numbers.

The new US export restrictions on AI accelerators to China were the biggest topic at the announcement of Nvidia's latest financial results. In the annual report, the new US export restrictions were addressed directly in the second paragraph. In the subsequent analyst conference, the word China was mentioned 27 times. According to Nvidia, it is losing 15 billion US dollars in sales due to the restrictions.

(mma)