Huawei takes aim at Nvidia's H100 with new Ascend 910D

Huawei is preparing its next big move against Nvidia's AI hardware dominance.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Chinese tech giant is developing its latest Ascend processor, the Ascend 910D. The chip is designed to go head-to-head with Nvidia’s flagship H100, with Huawei reportedly hoping it might even surpass it in performance.

Sources say Huawei has already reached out to domestic tech firms to line up testing partners and plans to ship the first test samples of the 910D in late May to verify technical feasibility.

Moving in on Nvidia's lost turf

Nvidia’s top-tier H100 has been barred from China since October 2023. Even China-tailored fallback chips are disappearing fast: on April 9, Nvidia was informed it would need a special export license to sell its modified H20 chips to China, a hurdle Nvidia estimated could cost up to $5.5 billion.

Those tightening rules have already cut deep into Nvidia's bottom line. China accounted for just 17% of Nvidia's revenue in 2024, down 9% compared to 2022.

Huawei is rushing to absorb that orphaned demand. The company is set to deliver over 800,000 Ascend 910B and 910C chips this year to heavyweights like TikTok owner ByteDance and state-owned telecom carriers. Following the latest curbs on the H20, several clients have already asked to increase their 910C orders, while Huawei is simultaneously speeding up work on its upcoming Ascend 920.

Why it matters

For Chinese tech giants training and deploying modern models, waiting on US export exemptions is no longer a viable business strategy. When Nvidia designed the H20, Chinese labs were leaning heavily on it to run lean architectures like DeepSeek. With that pipeline now restricted, homegrown silicon has shifted from a backup plan to an immediate requirement.

If the 910D passes early testing with ByteDance and telecoms this summer, it could give domestic labs a serious alternative for high-end training clusters. The immediate hurdle won't just be raw silicon performance, but whether Huawei's software stack can ease the pain of migrating away from CUDA.

We think this cements the end of the "compliance workaround" era. Nvidia spent years cutting clock speeds and memory bandwidth to design China-compliant hardware, but Washington continues to close those avenues. Huawei is playing this aggressively by locking in large supply agreements now, though the biggest question mark remains manufacturing yields and whether it can mass-produce advanced chips under heavy equipment restrictions.