Huawei’s New AI Chips Could Work With NVIDIA’s Chips & Compete With 2022 GPU, Says Rumor
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According to a rumor on social media, China’s Huawei is developing a new AI processor that aims to compete with NVIDIA’s H100 GPU. NVIDIA’s latest AI GPUs are the Blackwell series, and the rumor suggests that a new Huawei chip called the Ascend 910D, can use four chip dies for a larger chip than the current high-end Ascend 910C. Investigative reports have suggested that the Chinese firm has access to as many as two million individual chip dies, which are joined together to produce high-power chips. Today’s rumor indicates that Huawei is struggling to design new chips by relying on older dies to produce high-power equipment.
Huawei Allegedly Resorting To Multi-Die Packaging To Overcome Chip Production Constraints
While US sanctions have crippled Huawei’s ability to manufacture high-end chips due to being unable to work with chip manufacturers with access to the latest lithography equipment, multiple reports have suggested that the firm managed to procure advanced dies before the sanctions came into effect. A chip die is a single chip which is assembled or packaged into multi-die options through packaging to produce advanced AI GPUs.
Huawei’s Ascend chip dies are reportedly used to manufacture the Ascend 910C AI processors, with each processor relying on two dies. However, a report from Chinese social media suggests that the firm is aiming to connect four dies to create the Ascend 910D chip. The report outlines that this chip could beat NVIDIA’s H100 in performance. The NVIDIA H100 was launched in 2022, and OpenAI used the chip’s predecessor, the A100, to train ChatGPT.
However, US sanctions prevent NVIDIA from selling the H100 or its successors to China. Today’s report, if true, suggests that the Asian country is still struggling to meet NVIDIA’s advanced products in performance as US sanctions severely limit its ability to design and procure the latest hardware.
Not only does the report mention the design of the 910D, but it also shares details about its production and a potential successor. It claims that market shipments could start as soon as this quarter or by the second quarter of 2026.
It is important to note that while Huawei is believed to have access to two million Ascend chip dies, US estimates believe that China can produce a maximum of 200,000 AI chips in 2025 and packaging often leads to inefficiencies which reduce the total number of usable chips that can be produced with a given die inventory.
Consequently, assuming that Huawei has access to 1.5 million Asend dies, the firm could produce less than 400,000 Ascend 910D chips if it was able to package all of them into a four-die package without inefficiencies. However, the 910D chips could be manufactured by China’s SMIC, as has been indicated by earlier rumors.
As for the Ascend 910’s successor, the report believes that the design upgrade will be called the Ascend 920. It will use a two-die design as default, and it will also be operable with NVIDIA’s products. The report suggests that the 920 could rely on a general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) framework, which expands the performance of a typical GPU chip. It adds that the 920 could also begin small-scale shipments in 2027.
