Ascend AI chips surpass Nvidia in China as Huawei weans off American tech

According to Huawei's own estimate, its Ascend AI chips now outsell Nvidia's in China. The company has released the transcript of its meeting with reporters around the Huawei Connect conference held earlier, and the claim was issued by rotating chairman Eric Xu.

He thinks Ascend's share is now bigger, as what it can't compete with in raw power, it makes up for in chip quantity. At the expo, Huawei unveiled the Atlas 950 SuperPoD, built on Huawei's new Peerium architecture. Peerium does away with the traditional master and slave design and connects CPUs, NPUs, memory, SSDs, network cards, and switches as equals.

The aim is to make thousands or even tens of thousands of processors act like one computer, but supply is the bigger problem right now. Xu said Huawei cannot meet even Chinese demand, so it has no plan to export the Ascend AI chips internationally, though a few countries with strong demand do get some limited volumes.

Analysts previously told Bloomberg that Huawei still trails Nvidia technologically, with even the latest Ascend chips delivering only a fraction of Nvidia's performance. Huawei's answer is that massive clustering and faster interconnects can make up the difference.

Huawei's chips may not be as good as hoped, but supply is plentiful, so Xu called for full self-sufficiency across the semiconductor chain as the only way forward. Huawei's consumer chief Richard Yu was just as blunt about manufacturing. EUV machines are key to advanced chips, he said, and China is developing them, but the country still relies on DUV for now. Huawei's workaround is LogicFolding, part of its Tau law approach, used in the Kirin 9050 chips in the Mate 90 Pro Max. The company expects Tau law chips to match the transistor density of a 1.4 nm process by 2031, which is a pretty bold claim for its current state of advanced production node affairs.

Software is the other half of the break from American technology dependence. HarmonyOS now runs on phones, tablets, wearables, PCs, and cars, and Huawei counts over 90 million devices, 450,000 apps and services, and 11 million developers.

Yu confirmed that a more ambitious push for the Android replacement software is on the table but said Huawei is considering bringing HarmonyOS to the global market gradually. He noted that Windows Phone, Samsung's bada effort, and Nokia's Symbian all failed, and Huawei succeeded despite arriving much later, so it clearly envisions HarmonyOS as the third mobile software ecosystem next to iOS and Android.