Defanged By Trumpian Trade War, Huawei Attempts To Reinvent Itself As AI Chipmaker With Billions In Subsidies From Chinese State

Huawei Technologies is set to introduce a new, best-in-class chip for artificial intelligence (AI) as the embattled Chinese telecom behemoth seeks to reinvent itself as an AI chipmaker and mount a challenge to the undisputed AI computing champion Nvidia, The Wall Street Journal reported.

According to the WSJ report, Ascend 910C, the company's new chip likely to be shipped before the end of the year, is comparable to Nvidia’s H100. The processors were manufactured by China;s leading chip manufacturer SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp),

Huawei's Ascend 910B, already available in the Chinese mainland, is regarded by a few industry observers to be on par in terms of computing power with Nvidia. 

Huawei first introduced the Ascend chip series in 2019, four months after the company was added to a US trade blacklist after Washington deemed the company a national security threat.

Huawei’s computing business has two main product lines; Kunpeng for general servers and Ascend for AI computing.

That Hawaii's latest AI chip is on par with Nvidia’s H100 underscores the importance of the company to China's quest for semiconductor self-sufficiency.

Nvidia's H100 is a powerful AI and high-performance computing (HPC) GPU designed for data centers and cloud computing applications.

Based on Nvidia's Hopper architecture, it is considered one of the most advanced GPUs available. Its impressive performance and features make H100 a popular choice among researchers, scientists, and developers working on complex, compute-intensive tasks. However H100 chips cannot be accessed by Chinese firms.

In September 2022, the Biden administration imposed a new license requirement on any products containing Nvidia's A100 and H100 integrated circuits used in the machine learning processes that enhance AI systems.

AI chip A100 and H100 were added to the U.S. export control list in order to address the possibility that the listed products may be routed to or utilised by a “military end use” or “military end user” in China.

Billions in Subsidy Support From Chinese Government

Huawei 's pivotal role in China’s AI infrastructure ecosystem under Beijing’s self-sufficiency drive is reflected in billions it has received from the government as subsidy support.

According to a report in South China Morning Post, Huawei received 7.3 billion yuan ($1.02 billion) in Chinese government subsidies in 2023, compared with 6.5 billion yuan ($942 million) in 2022 and 2.6 billion yuan ($362 million) in 2021.

US sanctions since 2019 severely restricted Huawei’s semiconductor development and dealt a body blow to its smartphone business. However the company has been quietly bolstering its chip business by partnering with various domestic suppliers,