Huawei managed to smuggle TSMC dies despite export control restrictions and is seemingly coasting on them to produce its ostensibly homebrew AI accelerators, according to a teardown of its 910C chip.
The Ascend 910C is China's main bet to replace Nvidia AI chips, and Huawei is producing it at SMIC as it quickly builds out its own foundry facilities for a complete vertical integration. Since SMIC still struggles with its 7nm production process yields, Huawei reportedly managed to obtain TSMC die for nearly three million Ascend chips via a shell company, circumventing export controls.
This has now been confirmed by semiconductor teardown specialists, who analyzed a 910C chip and found it is indeed packaging TSMC die with a last-gen high-bandwidth memory (HBM) by Samsung and SK Hynix. TSMC, which got fined $1 billion for the leaked die, was quick to point out that the new 910C teardown shows the chip was made with the same one "analyzed by this organization in October 2024, and not with a more recently manufactured die or more advanced technology." It confirmed that both the production and sales of the chips that reached Huawei despite the export restrictions "have been halted since then."
At the current production pace, Huawei is expected to churn out 653,000 Ascend 910C chips that use two TSMC dies, and have enough TSMC die stocked for production until next summer. Getting high-bandwidth memory to package with the TSMC chips has been much harder, though. The Samsung or SK Hynix chips that China managed to stockpile in the quarter before the HBM controls kicked in are not of the newest generation and are quickly running out, so it is reportedly circumventing the restrictions by de-soldering memory from products packaged loosely just for this purpose.
Still, HBM will reportedly present the main bottleneck in Huawei Ascend 910C AI chip production going forward. The 910C offers about half of the performance of the ubiquitous Nvidia H100 AI chip, which retails on Amazon for as much as the 910C reportedly costs Huawei to craft.
The 910C is somewhat shoddily packaged and prone to thermal inefficiencies, and Huawei still has to make millions of AI chips to satisfy domestic demand. Due to the HBM and die bottlenecks it would only be able to produce about a million 910C units in 2026, but Chinese government loans for equipping local AI chip and HBM foundries are now in the billions, so production is expected to scale up quickly.
Source(s)
TechInsights via Bloomberg & SemiAnalysis