The U.S. Department of Commerce just officially rescinded Biden's AI Diffusion Rule days before its May 15 enforcement date. The scrapped policy would have grouped countries into three tiers to restrict U.S. AI chip exports. Instead of blanket controls, the administration plans to negotiate directly with foreign allies, while warning that using Huawei Ascend chips anywhere still violates U.S. export law.
Nvidia is designing yet another round of compliant AI processors for China after Washington effectively barred its H20 GPUs, forcing a $5.5B inventory charge. The chipmaker has already briefed Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance on its new roadmap. Why it matters: With Huawei ramping up mass shipments of its Ascend 910C to local tech giants, Nvidia is racing against time to prevent its China data center revenue from crashing to zero.
Huawei is reportedly developing a new Ascend 910D AI chip designed to rival Nvidia's workhorse H100, and is actively seeking domestic partners for testing. Following fresh U.S. chip export curbs, a viable 910D could plug a critical computing gap in China's AI buildout.
Rumors around DeepSeek's upcoming R2 model just surfaced online, pointing to a massive 1.2T hybrid MoE model with 78B active parameters. The leak claims it achieves 82% hardware utilization on Huawei's Ascend 910B chips while undercutting GPT-4o pricing by over 97%, signaling a potential pivot away from Western AI hardware.
Agibot, founded by former Huawei "Genius Youth" Peng Zhihui, just unveiled a new family of five humanoid robots designed to rival Tesla's Optimus. The flagship bipedal Yuanzheng A2 stands 175 cm tall and runs on multimodal AI capable of tasks as delicate as threading a needle, targeting both household and factory floors.
Alibaba and Huawei just launched major AI updates to challenge global rivals. Alibaba Cloud debuted Tongyi Wanxiang, an image generator taking on Midjourney and DALL-E, while Huawei introduced its industrial-focused Pangu 3.0 model targeting freight safety and weather forecasting instead of content creation.
Huawei actually registered the "Vision Pro" trademark in China back in 2019, securing exclusive rights across smart glasses and VR headsets through 2031. With China being one of Apple's most crucial markets, Cupertino may be forced to rebrand its spatial computing headset locally or cut a licensing deal with Huawei.
