U.S. restrictions and tariffs on Chinese language imports could damage American firms, significantly people who promote semiconductors to China, in response to a report by The New York Occasions. As firms like NVIDIA brace for potential losses, probably as excessive as $5.5 billion from its H20 chip, Chinese language tech big Huawei is seizing the chance by making ready a competing product.
Huawei readies Ascend 920 chip
Reuters reported on April 21 that Huawei has a brand new chip prepared for Chinese language firms which may be pressured to hunt a substitute for NVIDIA. The Ascend 920, first reported on by DigiTimes Asia, may exchange NVIDIA’s H20 when it turns into out there for buy within the second half of 2025.
In response to Tom’s {Hardware}, the Huawei Ascend 920 has 900 TFLOPs per card and a 4 TB/s reminiscence bandwidth, making it considerably extra highly effective than the NVIDIA H20. The H20 is a lower-power model of NVIDIA’s H100, constructed for the Chinese language market in accordance with U.S. restrictions. AMD additionally faces strict restrictions on gross sales to China.
Huawei competes throughout a large swath of the tech world, together with with Apple on smartphones and Ericsson and Nokia in telecommunications, in response to The New York Occasions. Huawei may kind a enterprise relationship with DeepSeek, serving to increase its China-based superior AI efforts.
SEE: Microsoft added AI brokers to Copilot Studio, its software for customizing the AI Copilot.
Chip sanctions on China span Biden and Trump eras amid rising tech tensions
On April 15, the Trump administration restricted NVIDIA, Superior Micro Units, and Intel from promoting chips to China. Days later, shares in all three firms fell. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang met with Chinese language leaders and mentioned the area’s significance to the corporate.
An nameless New York Occasions supply stated China may use NVIDIA chips to construct information facilities as a part of the Belt and Street Initiative, a comfortable energy initiative to plant Chinese language-backed infrastructure worldwide. Sanctions towards NVIDIA started in 2022 underneath former President Joe Biden’s administration to stop the sale of high-performance chips to China.
Now, with stress mounting on either side of the Pacific, the race to regulate the way forward for AI and chipmaking is as a lot about geopolitics as it’s about silicon.
