Huawei unveils two AI chips, the Ascend 910 and Ascend 310, for data centers and internet-connected consumer devices, as it takes aim at Qualcomm and Nvidia
Arjun Kharpal / CNBC :
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2018 Ascend 910 and 310 launch is the origin point of a product line that has since become China's answer to Nvidia. What began as a two-chip announcement — one for data centers, one for connected consumer devices — matured into a full-stack challenge: by 2024, Chinese internet companies were testing the Ascend 910C, which Huawei told clients is comparable to Nvidia's H100.
The intervening years were not linear. Huawei hit a production ramp wall on its Ascend server chips under US export crackdowns, then responded with packaging workarounds like the dual-die 910C and, after Washington banned Nvidia's H20 from China, unveiled the Ascend 920 with mass production targeted for H2 2025. The 2018 unveil matters because it marks when Huawei committed to designing its own AI silicon rather than depending on American suppliers.
First-order effects
- Huawei enters merchant AI silicon against two incumbents at once — Nvidia in data-center training and inference, Qualcomm at the device edge — making itself the default domestic option for Chinese buyers of both.
Second-order effects
- US export controls on Nvidia's China-bound chips (A100 through H20) converted Huawei's alternative from a fallback into a primary procurement path, as seen in clients moving to mass shipments of the 910C and feasibility tests of the newer 910D.
- Nvidia loses pricing and volume leverage in China specifically, pushing it toward workarounds while Huawei's roadmap cadence — 910B to 910C to 910D to 920 — accelerates to fill each gap the bans open.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, AI compute splits into two largely non-interchangeable stacks — an Nvidia-led global one and a Huawei-led Chinese one — with Chinese cloud and internet customers structurally locked into domestic silicon regardless of relative performance.
- The edge-versus-datacenter split Huawei drew in 2018 anticipates where competition lands long-term: inference migrating onto devices, where Qualcomm's position, not just Nvidia's, comes under pressure.
The trend: AI compute is bifurcating into parallel national stacks, and Huawei's 2018 Ascend bet is the seed of the Chinese one now scaling behind export-control walls.