Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies has raised a red flag, stating that it cannot produce enough AI computing equipment to meet demand in China.
As per Chairman Eric Xu, the company is also limiting its overseas sales while stepping up its challenge to Nvidia’s chip-making ecosystem.
Xu said testing of Huawei’s Ascend 950DT AI chip had produced excellent results, and the company was in extensive discussions with Chinese AI model developers.
The Chairman also expected many domestic tech players to begin training models on systems using the chip from 2027 onwards.
“Since we don’t have enough capacity to even satisfy the demand in China, we don’t have a plan to expand into the international market in a fully-fledged way,” Xu told reporters at the company’s Huawei Connect conference in Shanghai.
“Huawei supplies some countries where demand is particularly strong, but volumes remain limited,” Xu added further.
While admitting that reliable data on Nvidia’s share of China’s AI chip market was difficult to obtain, Xu said, “I think Ascend market share should be bigger than Nvidia’s.”
Huawei is looking to play a bigger role at the center of China’s drive to build a domestic AI computing industry, with US export controls restricting access to Nvidia’s most advanced chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, making the task even more daunting.
Huawei itself has faced separate US trade restrictions since May 2019, forcing the tech conglomerate to seek its chip manufacturing ecosystem.
“We cannot accept a destiny where we cannot control our fate being determined by others in terms of willingness to sell chips to China or not. No matter if it’s for the Chinese government, industry in China, or for Huawei, it is certainly the way forward to try to push for full self-sufficiency for chips,” Xu said.
Huawei has made AI infrastructure central to its strategy.
Guo Ping, the chairman of Huawei’s supervisory board, told employees this week that the company viewed AI as its “biggest opportunity” and wanted its computing and connectivity infrastructure to play a role comparable to Nvidia’s.
Huawei has also detailed the specifications about its next generation of AI processors and computing systems.
“The company plans to have its Ascend 960DT chip ready in the first quarter of 2027, three quarters earlier than previously planned, and the 960PR ready in the third quarter, one quarter ahead of schedule,” Huawei said.
Huawei also intends to release a new generation of Ascend chips every year, with the 970 and 980 to follow in 2028 and 2029.
The company is working on a unique concept: Connecting large numbers of processors so they can work together as one larger computing system.
As per Huawei, clusters of about 100,000 chips have become standard for training some of the “largest AI models,” while communication between machines can consume more than 40% of training time in conventional server systems.
To address these issues, the company is looking to pitch its concept of connecting large numbers of processors so that the latter can act as faster links between processors that will reduce that training time-related bottleneck, apart from making better use of available computing power.
Huawei unveiled a new computing architecture, called “Peerium,” designed eventually to allow as many as one million processors to operate together as a single system.
In Peerium, the UnifiedBus technology connects processors, memory, storage, and networking equipment inside those systems.
As per Huawei, its new Ascend 960 supernode would connect as many as 4,096 AI processors.
“Multiple supernodes could then be linked into clusters containing hundreds of thousands of processors, with the largest planned systems supporting as many as one million,” the tech conglomerate stated further.
Huawei has already deployed more than 1,000 systems using its earlier Ascend 910C processors, while its Ascend 950 systems have entered commercial use.