Huawei’s Ascend 910C: Poised To Challenge NVIDIA’s H100s With Top AI Performance in China’s Market – An Overview of Rumored Specifications

Huawei is gearing up to make headlines with its latest AI accelerator, the Ascend 910C. This highly anticipated chip has officially entered production, and the buzz around what it brings to the table is palpable.

The Ascend 910C is built using both TSMC and SMIC’s 7nm process, and industry insiders are predicting that Huawei is poised to ship millions of these AI chips. It’s hard to ignore the technological revolution sweeping through China’s AI industry. With groundbreaking models like DeepSeek’s R1 driving the market, the demand for robust computing power is skyrocketing. Huawei, with its Ascend 910C, is poised to surge ahead in this competitive landscape. In a detailed analysis shared by @ohlennart, the 910C is heralded as a potential challenger to NVIDIA’s H100 in the Chinese market.

According to a recent tweet from Lennart Heim, Huawei’s upcoming AI accelerator is entering mass production and is hailed as China’s finest AI chip. There is speculation about significant numbers matching NVIDIA’s H100 prowess this year. The performance metrics and strategic advantages of this chip make for enticing reading, suggesting a competitive edge for Huawei.

The 910C may not mirror the complexity of NVIDIA’s designs, but it employs a clever strategy. It utilizes dual silicon interposers linked by an organic substrate, essentially combining two Ascend 910B chips to boost overall performance. Impressively, the Ascend 910C is expected to achieve 800 TFLOP/s with FP16 and offer a memory bandwidth of up to 3.2 TB/s—almost on par with NVIDIA’s H100.

Huawei is leveraging both TSMC and SMIC’s 7nm technology to manufacture these chips. Before any export restrictions, they had placed significant orders with TSMC, ensuring a strong supply chain. Additionally, SMIC’s advancements in 7nm technology, producing around 50,000 wafers monthly, complement the production needs, paving the way for mass distribution of the Ascend 910C chips.

This chip represents a significant milestone for China’s AI landscape, even if the computing power lags slightly behind global counterparts. Despite being approximately 10-20 times less powerful than international leaders, companies like DeepSeek illustrate there are effective ways to optimize limited computing resources. With the abundant talent in China, the international competition in AI technology is bound to intensify, making the upcoming years immensely exciting for the industry.