Huawei Ascend 920: Nvidia H20 replacement rumoured to launch later this year

Even though TSMC thwarted Huawei's attempt to manufacture its Ascend 910B chips on its cutting-edge node, the Chinese behemoth has found new ways to acquire cutting-edge hardware for its AI training purposes. The Ascend 910C came shortly after, and SemiAnalysis' deep dive into the chip suggests it has the chops to take on Nvidia, albeit with a ton of caveats. Now, a new report from DigiTimes says its successor (Ascend 920) is tipped to arrive soon.

Noted X leaker Jukanlosreve says the Ascend 920 will be manufactured on SMIC's 6 nm class N+3 node. It will enter mass production in the second half of 2025. The chip offers 900 TFLOPS of (likely) BF16 TFLOPS and memory bandwidth of 4,000 GB/s, thanks to HBM3 memory. It aims to replace the recently banned Nvidia's Hopper-based H20 chip that was designed specifically for China.

The Ascend 920's arrival also heralds SMIC's new 6 nm class node, which will likely trickle down to other products, such as Kirin chips for Huawei smartphones. While the earlier rumoured Kirin 9100 turned out to be a dud, it might actually launch later this year. There have been murmurs about a 5 nm class SMIC node being in the works, but progress on that is likely slow due to lack of access to EUV machines.