China’s Huawei to Double Ascend 910C AI Chip Yield, Amid NVIDIA Ban

Huawei’s in-house AI chip, the Ascend 910C will reportedly see an increase in production numbers this year. The NVIDIA Hopper H100 rival is projecting a 40% increase in yield for 2025 and is looking to up the ante with strong support from the Chinese government.

Part of China’s tech plans is to break free of the US monopoly and establish its independent line of advanced semiconductors. In fact, Huawei’s AI chips were also part of DeepSeek’s “seismic” release that rattled global tech stocks, when the app was released to the public.

This year, Huawei plans on producing close to 100,000 units of Ascend 910C, with 300,000 more units of the older Ascend 910B stacked behind its back. In 2024, Huawei only produced 200,000 Ascend 910Bs and faced issues with LLM training, too.

The new and improved Ascend 910C is looking to attract local clientele with the likes of ByteDance and Tencent. It is manufactured on SMIC’s 7nm process node (2nd-gen). The technology is still far from equaling NVIDIA’s Blackwell AI products, but it does guarantee some degree of semiconductor independence for China.

Huawei, at the moment, accounts for more than 75% of the country’s AI chips, and with strong yield numbers, is looking to improve its production yield to 60% by the end of this year.

This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.

Source: Financial Times