Customer testing of Huawei's new AI chip, designed to challenge Nvidia in ⁠the China market, has gone well and big tech giants including ByteDance and Alibaba plan to place orders, two insiders said.

The development marks a milestone for Huawei.

This time around, tech firms intend to use the new Ascend 950PR more extensively, much happier now that the chip is more compatible with Nvidia's Cuda software system and has better response speeds, said the two people ⁠and a third person with knowledge of those plans.

Huawei plans to ship around 750,000 950PRs ⁠this year, according to the two insiders.

They said samples were sent to customers in January and that mass production should begin next month, setting the stage for fully fledged shipments to start in the second half of the ⁠year.

A launch of the 950PR comes at a difficult time for Nvidia in China.

Many of its artificial intelligence chips have been banned from sale in China by Washington.

The Trump administration last year greenlighted the sale of Nvidia's H200 chips – more powerful than currently restricted products – albeit with a number of conditions that could limit the amounts sold.

The H200 has also recently received approval from Chinese authorities, but it remains unclear when they would be allowed into the country.

Huawei mentioned its new chip in September when it outlined its long-term semiconductor plans for the first time and said it would be launching some of the world's most powerful computing systems.

The 950PR, which uses traditional DDR memory, will be priced at around 50,000 yuan per card, while a premium version with faster ⁠HBM memory will sell for around 70,000 yuan, the sources said.

Where previously Huawei had stuck to its proprietary CANN software system, the new chips will allow developers at Chinese tech firms, which have generally used Nvidia's software system thus far, to migrate those models more easily.

The sources said the chip was designed to excel in handling inference workloads – the process of running trained AI models to answer queries or execute tasks.

Demand for AI inference computing in ⁠China is surging as the country's tech sector shifts its focus from model development to real-world deployment, a trend turbocharged by the rapid adoption of open-source AI agent OpenClaw. (Reuters)


Edited by Tony Sabine