Ascend 910D — Huawei's new AI chip challenges Nvidia's flagship H100

      The United States blocked the supply of top-end Nvidia GPUs to China, and... gave the Chinese a great incentive. Huawei responds to sanctions with its own forged iron, the Ascend 910D chip, which promises to "leapfrog" the H100 and close the shortage of computing brains in the AI market. What is inside the novelty, why it is expected in May — the IT-World understands.

       When Washington banned the H100 in 2022, and this spring demanded export licenses even for the stripped-down H20, Nvidia unwittingly gave a starting signal to Chinese developers. Huawei heard the shot the loudest: by the end of May, the company plans to send the first customers samples of the Ascend 910D chip, which should

       show a result higher than H100.

       Ascend has its own evolution: the 910B model became the base, two such crystals were "glued" into the 910C case and received approximately 60% of the H100 output power. Now the 910D promises a full-fledged new architecture and a threshold of 10 PFLOPS FP16 (≈10,000 TOPS) at every opportunity. Energy efficiency is still below the American benchmark, but ByteDance, Baidu and other consumers have been looking for an answer for a long time, where to get GPUs if they just don't sell them?

       The novelty is mainly produced by SMIC using the 7nm N+2 process technology. The output of crystals is far from the "Taiwanese" ideal, but without the threat of sudden blocking. The industry is joking: "China has its own Moore's Law — every six months Huawei doubles the number of GPUs to replace one banned H100."

       In the coming months, it will become clear whether the Ascend 910D confirms the stated figures and whether SMIC will be able to stamp thousands of chips instead of hundreds. But even if Huawei shows 90% of the H100's power, the company will take the main prize — independence from licenses and prohibition lists. And this is perhaps the most important metric of efficiency in the era of tariffs and sanctions.