HJBC Customer testing of Huawei Technologies' new AI chip, aimed at challenging Nvidia ( NVDA ) in the China market, has gone well, and companies including Alibaba ( BABA ) and ByteDance ( BDNCE ) plan to place orders, Reuters reported, citing two people with knowledge of the matter. Despite government measures to boost the use of local chips, the company struggled to persuade big tech giants in ...
HJBC Customer testing of Huawei Technologies' new AI chip, aimed at challenging Nvidia ( NVDA ) in the China market, has gone well, and companies including Alibaba ( BABA ) and ByteDance ( BDNCE ) plan to place orders, Reuters reported, citing two people with knowledge of the matter. Despite government measures to boost the use of local chips, the company struggled to persuade big tech giants in the private sector to adopt its current flagship chip, the Ascend 910C, in large quantities, industry sources have previously said, the report added . However, this time, tech companies plan to use the new 950PR chip more extensively, as the chip is more compatible with Nvidia's CUDA software system and has better response speeds, the report noted. Huawei intends to ship about 750,000 950PRs this year. They said samples were sent to customers in January and that mass manufacturing should start next month, setting the stage for fully fledged shipments to begin in the second half of the year, according to the report. Alibaba, ByteDance, and Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha. The 950PR, which uses traditional DDR memory, will be priced at about 50,000 yuan (around $6,900) per card, and a premium version with faster High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM, memory will sell for about 70,000 yuan, the report noted. Previously, Huawei had stuck to its proprietary CANN software system, but the new chips will allow developers at Chinese tech companies, which have generally used Nvidia's software system so far, to migrate those models more easily, the report added. Compared to the 910C, the chip only offers a small improvement in raw computing power, but it is designed to excel in handling inference workloads, the report noted. AI inference is the process where a trained AI model applies its learned patterns to new data to make predictions, generate content, or make decisions. Huawei's chips face competition from Nvidia, but the U.S. tech gia...