Huawei
Huawei to ship 700K+ Ascend 910 chips despite SMIC’s low yields: Analysts
US is increasing sanctions against Huawei AI chips, but the company still hopes to sell around 700K+ Ascend 910 series processors in the Chinese market. Analysts are sharing their estimates about Huawei’s AI chipset shipments this year.
Mizuho – a Japanese financial institution and one of Japan’s three “mega banks” predicts that Huawei can ship nearly 700K+ Ascend 910 series AI chips in 2025.
One of the Mizuho analysts, Vijay Rakesh, says that despite SMIC’s low yield on the 7nm process, Huawei will sell a large number of Ascend 910C AI chips in China.
“In China, we estimate Ascend 910A/B/C potentially at 700K+ units in 2025E, but yields at key foundry SMIC remain fairly low, we estimate – 30%.”
SMIC has seen ‘fairly low’ production of 7nm process nodes last year, which powers up the Ascend 910C. But as per a previous report, Huawei aims to begin mass shipment of the respective chipset in China amid production and supply chain issues.
Huawei to ship 700K+ Ascend 910 chips despite SMIC’s low yields: Analysts(Image Credits: Huawei)
Ascend 910C – Nvidia H100 alternative!
Ascend 910C is considered a significant alternative to the Nvidia H100 AI GPU. It is a merger of two 910B chips that can deliver 800 TFLOP/s of computing power at FP16. The DeepSeek team reportedly said 910C achieved 60% of H100’s inference performance.
The analysts further shed light on Nvidia’s sales performance in China. He said that the US chipmaker may continue to face a downfall in its second-largest market, following the latest US curbs that put a halt on H20 shipment in China.
US has recently shared new guidelines on chip controls. As per these rules, anyone in the world using Huawei AI chips will now require a special license. If they violate these regulations, they will face strict penalties.
China hit back at the US for abusing export controls and constantly targeting a single firm. The Chinese government said to fight for the legitimate rights of its native firms. But how far these efforts will help Huawei to achieve its AI chip goals would be worth looking at.
