Huawei singled out by Nvidia as a top competitor in AI for the first time

Apart from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) and some Pink Floyd albums, AI is as close to magic as we can get right now as a civilization. But for the magic to happen, we need AI chips – there’s a whole AI infrastructure that keeps the AI lights on and ensures that the Galaxy AI tools in our Galaxy S24, for example, work properly.

Currently, Nvidia dominates the AI market, but there’s competition ahead.

Nvidia identifies Huawei as a top competitor in the AI chips production field (and several more areas) for the first time in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, reports Reuters.

This comes mere hours after it became known that the Biden administration is turning up the heat on China's top-sanctioned chipmaker – the SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp). The US officials are set to cut off SMIC’s most advanced factory from getting more American imports. That’s because SMIC produced a sophisticated chip for Huawei's Mate 60 Pro, people familiar with the matter said.

Nvidia highlighted that Huawei competes in supplying chips designed for AI such as graphics processing units (GPUs), central processing units (CPUs), and networking chips. NVIDIA also identified Huawei as a cloud service company designing its own hardware and software to improve AI computing, the report reads.

Huawei’s most sought-after chips are the ones in the Ascend series The Chinese company's main product, the 910B chip, is its main rival to Nvidia's A100 chip, which launched roughly three years ago.

That’s the same chip manufacturing that Huawei decided to prioritize over its premium Mate 60 phones.

See, Huawei uses the same facility that produces both its Ascend AI chips and the Kirin chips that power the Mate 60 Pro and, according to insiders, the output has been crippled by a low yield rate. The yield is the percentage of acceptable chips produced compared to the maximum chip count on one wafer.

Huawei developed the Ascend series of chips as a rival to Nvidia's line of AI chips. Analysts have estimated China's AI chip market to be worth $7 billion.