Huawei has reportedly signed a large contract with tech giant Baidu to supply it with artificial intelligence chips. Its new dedicated processor Ascend 910B would be at the level of the famous A100 from Nvidia, which dominates the market.
The Chinese manufacturer Huawei is best known for its smartphones and his telecoms infrastructure, but this is far from being its only activities. For around 4 years, the brand has been developing AI chips For assert itself as a major player of this booming market. In 2018, Huawei unveils theAscend 910 before officially launching the processor a year later. The stated ambition is to offer a recognized range to supply businesses, but LAmerican embargo decreed the same year puts a brake on this desire for expansion.
At that time, the company claimed that its AI chip was the most powerful in the world, engraved in 7nm. According to her, the Ascend 910 can provide 256 TeraFLOPS for floating point operations (FP16) and 512 TeraOPS for precision calculations of integers (INT8). Energy consumption caps at 310W, which is better than the 350W that Huawei initially expected. But the arrival of Nvidia’s A100 processor in 2020, followed by the H100 in 2022, prevents the Chinese brand from establishing itself.
Huawei’s new Ascend 910B chip would be at the level of Nvidia’s A100
Huawei is not giving up yet and according to Reuters, the firm signed a major contract with the Chinese Tech giant Baidu. The order, placed in August, is for 1600 Ascend 910B chips for 200 servers. This is therefore a new version of the processor, of which we know some details even if it has not yet been made official.
According to Liu Qingfeng, president of iFlyTek, which specializes in artificial intelligence, it is “generally the same as Nvidia’s A100”. According to analysts, this is the case in terms of raw computing powerbut not performance where the Ascend 910B remains behind its competitors.
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This is still an excellent opportunity for Huawei. The AI chip market in China is estimated to be more than 6.5 billion euros. The country’s government also makes no secret of its desire to depend less on the West, particularly for development of artificial intelligence and semiconductors.