The United States announced on April 9, 2025 that it would further tighten restrictions for AI chip exports into China. This included Nvidia’s H20 processor. It was a reduced performance chip created by the company to comply with previous US export regulations, while continuing to sell in China.
Huawei has been positioning itself for some time as China’s answer for Nvidia. It was likely waiting for this announcement, because one day later at a partner event, it announced the Ascend 920.
According to, mass production is expected to begin in the second half 2025. DigiTimes AsiaThe chip is expected to be built using SMIC’s 6-nm process, and will offer up to 900 TFLOPS of BF16 computation and 4000GB/s memory bandwidth. This is supported by HBM3 modules. It will also support PCIe 5.0, next-generation interconnect protocol and large-model training.
The new chip from Huawei could be a good alternative to the Nvidia’s H20, which is now restricted in China. Industry analysts believe that Huawei’s new chips can fill the gap. Although real-world benchmarks have not yet been released, the Ascend 920 specifications suggest that it could be a viable alternative to Nvidia H20. This may be welcomed by Chinese firms like Tencent and ByteDance who will need substitutes for this restricted chip. While the Ascend 910C can deliver 60% of the Nvidia’s H100 inference performance, it is reported that the Ascend 920 improves training by 30% to 40%. It is also tailored for the Transformer and Mixture of Experts model.
Nvidia was making strong sales in China with the H20. Sales reportedly grew 50% quarter-over-quarter before the ban. The new license requirement by the U.S. Department of Commerce has effectively stopped those sales. Nvidia will write off $5.5 Billion in lost business.
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Huawei announced its AI CloudMatrix Supernode at the same event.
This rack scale platform, described as a Nuclear level product’, reportedly surpasses the performance Nvidia’s GB200, but consumes more energy, something which is not a major concern for China compared to Western countries.
Huawei’s supercharged SSD is paired with a 60 year old technology
Wayne Williams writes news for TechRadar Pro as a freelancer. He has been writing for 30 years about computers, technology and the web. In that time, he wrote for many of the UK PC magazines and launched, edited, and published several of them.
