Huawei
Huawei eyes Nvidia’s share in Chinese AI chip market: Report

Huawei is finding ways to eat Nvidia’s share in the Chinese AI chip market. The company aims to position its new AI chipsets as the first choice for local firms regarding LLM training. This move will eventually turn the table towards Huawei.
Nvidia can not supply advanced AI chips following the U.S. export controls. However, it still has a significant share of the Chinese AI chip field due to its effective GPUs.
Although Huawei now seeks ways to gain Nvidia’s share in the Chinese AI chip market. The idea is to challenge the US chipmaker in ‘inference’ tasks instead of training LLM.
Inference refers to the process of running live data through a trained AI model to make a prediction or solve a task. It’s a test of how well the LLM can apply and use the ‘learned information’ while training an AI model about task completion.
Despite the US-China chip war, many Chinese AI firms still depend on Nvidia GPU processors. These SoCs are mainly used for LLMs as they are considered crucial for developing large language models and training them as per requirement.
Huawei aims to end Chinese firms’ dependency on Nvidia in inference tasks. It believes that inference will become a bigger source of AI chip demand in the future.
Georgios Zachaeopoulous – a senior AI researcher working on inference acceleration at Huawei’s Zurich lab said:
“Training is important, but it only occurs a few times. Huawei is mostly focused on inference, which ultimately will serve more customers.”
New Ways to use Huawei AI chips
As per an Ascend AI chip customer, Huawei is focusing on chip potential rather than its technical usage. Since Nvidia GPUs and Ascend need different software to operate, Huawei is aiding firms to use another software tool to make things work.
Huawei is also getting help from the Chinese government to work on this idea. The authorities have instructed native firms to choose Huawei AI chipsets over Nvidia.

Huawei eyes Nvidia’s share in Chinese AI chip market: Report (Image Credits: Nvidia)
Some people familiar with Nvidia’s work in China see Huawei as “the most serious competitor in the country” since it is making efforts to advance its chip design.
Although these steps can’t deny the fact that Ascend chips still has many challenges in the Chinese market. Bernstein’s China semiconductor analyst – Lin Qinguan said:
“While the Ascend chips perform well on a per-chip basis, there is a bottleneck with the inter-chip connectivity. While training a big model, you must break it into smaller tasks. If one chip fails, the software needs to figure out a way for the other chips to take over without delay.”
Another major challenge for Huawei in the AI chip field is to persuade Chinese companies to use its ‘secret sauce’ software instead of Nvidia’s Cuda.
Huawei is currently working on the Ascend 910C processor. The company says that the new processor can resolve many issues found in the previous-gen chips. Though whether it will be able to take over Nvidia’s share in the Chinese market would be worth looking forward to.
Huawei silently testing Ascend 910C AI chip to rival Nvidia: Report
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