Huawei's New AI Chip Alternative to Nvidia

Huawei Announces New AI Chip for Mass Shipment

With Huawei's announcement of the 910c artificial intelligence chip, the AI arms race is getting red hot and causing ripple effects across the US stock market and American trade policies. The 910C combines two 910B processors to achieve performance just as good as Nvidia's H100 chip.

Export restrictions by the Trump administration on US AI technology has forced China to innovate cheaper ways to achieve comparable results. DeepSeek, for instance, was an AI system built on American open weight software and pairing what American AI hardware they had with their own cheaper computer chips.

Since Nvidia chips are now required to have an export license to be sold to Chinese customers, Huawei plans to start shipping their new 910C chips to Chinese customers next month.

Hauwei's 910C AI Chip Explained

Though the H100 is an older Nvidia AI chip, Huawei is touting they can match its performance with the new 910C. According to those familiar with the design, the 910C is an AI chip architectural evolution and not a technological breakthrough.

The 910C has double the computing power and memory capacity of the 910B for enhanced AI applications like support of diverse workload data processing.

Nvidia vs Huawei and China vs US

The impact of this development on US/China trade policy and the AI arms race is huge. Without access to Nvidia's H20 chips, the 910C will be the Chinese AI model developer's chip of choice.

On Monday, Nvidia's stock dropped about 5% to 96.06 while AMD fell about 3% to 84.84. The real threat looms in the near distance though, as Huawei plans to release its next-generation AI chip, the Ascend 920, which supposedly offers performance comparable to the Nvidia H20.

Last year, Huawei announced they would be distributing the 910C to a few Chinese technology firms. Next month, the chips will be available to Chinese customers.

Since last year, Nvidia's stock has fallen over 28% as a result of trade restrictions and changes in demand for AI processors.

Conclusion

Another step toward a more competitive China in the AI arms race. America may still be leagues ahead with all sorts of new and powerful AI systems and AI algorithms on the horizon, but China just made a crucial evolution in their AI chip design.

The computational intensity of Nvidia's H20 is still best, giving American AI systems more processing power than China. However, China is making the leaps to make their AI systems energy efficient and power efficient. It should be wise to speculate that soon, China's AI systems and hardware will become massively parallel with the USA's.