Huawei mass-ships Ascend 910C as China's alternative to restricted Nvidia H20

Reuters reported that Huawei was preparing mass shipments of its Ascend 910C AI chip to Chinese customers, with some deliveries already made after the company began sampling the chip to select firms the previous year and taking commercial orders soon after. The 910C combines two 910B processors into a single package, roughly doubling the compute and memory of its predecessor, and was pitched by Chinese buyers as the leading domestic substitute after Washington restricted sales of Nvidia’s China-specific H20 chip the same month.

Reporting was explicit that the chip was “not viewed as a technological breakthrough” — it narrowed rather than closed the gap with Nvidia’s restricted hardware — and that manufacturing remained constrained. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation was reported to be producing the 910C using its N+2 7-nanometre process, but analysts put yields at only around 30%, well below what a mature commercial process would deliver. Huawei was nonetheless reported to be targeting roughly 700,000 shipped units across its 910A, 910B and 910C variants combined for 2025, with the 910C alone said to offer up to 800 teraflops of compute.

The episode illustrated the practical shape of the export-control era rather than a decisive shift in it: Chinese AI developers gained a usable, if inferior and supply-constrained, domestic alternative just as their access to Nvidia’s compliant chip was being cut off, keeping pressure on both Washington’s policy and Huawei’s production capacity through the rest of 2025. Huawei’s chip remained a second-best option rather than a like-for-like replacement, but it was the clearest evidence yet that Chinese buyers had somewhere to turn when Nvidia’s hardware was unavailable.