Huawei launches the Ascend 920 AI chip to replace Nvidia’s H20
Huawei launches the Ascend 920 AI chip. On April 9, Donald Trump made the ban on AI chip exports to China bigger by adding Nvidia's H20 chip. Just a day later, Huawei shared news about its new AI chip, the Ascend 920, during a partner event. According to DigiTimes Asia, this chip is going to start mass production in the second half of 2025. Experts say it could replace the H20 chips that China can’t get anymore.
The Nvidia H20 chip is still a favorite choice for Chinese companies, even though it's not as powerful as newer AI chips. It has earned billions of dollars selling this lower-powered chip in the region, with sales growing by 50% each quarter. Unfortunately, things have taken a turn for Nvidia, as the company is expected to lose $5.5 billion in sales and write it off.
This is a big chance for Huawei, which has been working for years to reach Nvidia’s level. Its current AI chip, the Ascend 910C, delivers around 60% of the Nvidia H100’s performance for AI tasks. The upcoming Ascend 920, which is built with a 6 nm process, is expected to reach over 900 TFLOPs per card and have a memory speed of 4 TB/s using HBM3. There's also a 920C version, made for Transformer and Mixture of Experts models, which is said to be 30–40% more efficient than the previous chip. Meanwhile, the next-gen Ascend 920, which is built with a 6 nm chip process, is going to exceed 900 TFLOPs per card and features a 4 TB/s memory speed using HBM3 modules. Also, its 920C version, which is designed for Transformer and Mixture of Experts models, is expected to boost efficiency by around 30% to 40% compared to the previous model.
Huawei's reveal of the Ascend 920 surprised some industry insiders, especially since it came just after the White House announced a ban on Nvidia's H20 and AMD's MI308. Reports also suggest that Trump temporarily paused the planned H20 export ban after Huang spent a million dollars on a dinner with the president at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
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However, the planned expansion of export controls has reportedly been in the works for several months, so the Chinese chipmaker has likely been preparing for its arrival.
As a result, Huawei probably started working on the Ascend 920 behind the scenes and was simply waiting for the chip restrictions to be implemented before making its announcement.
In addition to the Ascend 920, Huawei also unveiled its AI CloudMatrix 384 solution at the same partner conference. This rack-scale solution offers better performance than the Nvidia GB200, though it comes with higher power consumption. Despite this, it’s likely to attract interest from Chinese companies, especially as neighboring countries like Singapore and Malaysia increase efforts to crack down on smuggling rings attempting to bring sanctioned chips into China.