How Huawei plans to rival Nvidia in the AI chip business

Huawei's AI chip series, Ascend 910B, is comparable to Nvidia's A100 in terms of raw computing power. Baidu ordered 1,600 of Huawei's chips in Aug. Huawei's chip is seen as the most sophisticated domestic option in China, creating an opening for Huawei to win market share in the $7B AI chip market.

U.S. curbs on the sales of advanced artificial chips by Nvidia to China are creating an opening for Huawei to win market share, with sources saying it won a sizeable AI chip order from Chinese tech giant Baidu this year.

Better known globally for its telecoms and smartphones businesses, Huawei has for the past four years been building an AI chip line.

Here is what we know about its Ascend AI chip series, and its main product to rival Nvidia's A100 chip, the 910B.

Huawei first unveiled its Ascend 910 in 2018 and the chip was officially launched in 2019 as part of a strategy to build a full-stack AI portfolio and become a provider of computing power. That same year, the company became the target of U.S. export controls.

At the time, Huawei claimed that its chip was the world's most powerful AI processor and Chinese media reports said the original Ascend 910 was manufactured on a 7 nanometer process.

Huawei said the chip could deliver 256 TeraFLOPS for half-precision floating point (FP16) operations and 512 TeraOPS for integer precision calculations (INT8).

The company also touted the chip's efficiency, saying that its max power consumption was 310W which it said had exceeded Huawei's original target at 350W.