From Bloomberg, September 22:
Huawei Technologies Co. openly admits its silicon can’t match Nvidia Corp.’s in raw power and speed. So to pack the same punch, China’s national champion is counting on its traditional strengths: brute force, networking, and policy support.
Huawei on Thursday took the rare step of publicizing a three-year vision for eroding Nvidia’s dominance in the AI boom. Rotating Chairman Eric Xu outlined the technology the Shenzhen-based company envisions in painstaking detail during its annual Huawei Connect conference, triggering wall-to-wall media coverage.
The unusually loud fanfare — emerging a day before US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held their second phone meeting in four months — stands in contrast with Huawei’s typically more subdued approach. The secretive company has introduced successive generations of AI products without even a press release after it lost access to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the go-to chipmaker for Nvidia, in 2020 due to US curbs.
Huawei has also not specified the technology of mobile processors in its latest smartphones in recent years — industry experts had to break down devices to figure out their technological innards.
On Thursday, the company trumpeted its grand plan with all the drama of an Nvidia launch. Xu took the stage to present the next generation of AI chips, twinned with its upgraded “SuperPod” designs — a term borrowed from Nvidia’s own playbook that refers to a data center platform that encompasses computing, storage, networking, software and infrastructure management technologies.
In theory, the technique lets Huawei link as many as 15,488 of its Ascend-branded AI chips using self-developed UnifiedBus interconnect protocol, a new technology also formally unveiled on Thursday.
That’s the rough equivalent of overwhelming an enemy force through sheer numbers, and its prowess is further enhanced by far faster data transmissions between individual chips — as much as 62 times quicker than Nvidia’s upcoming NVLink144 technology, Huawei claims. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s current-generation NVLink72 technology allows the company to connect 72 Blackwell graphic processing units and 36 Grace central processing units together.
“Huawei’s willingness to publicly articulate its AI roadmap represents a strong signal of confidence in the resilience of its future local foundry supply,” Bernstein analysts led by Qingyuan Lin said in a note published on Monday. “These developments indicate that Huawei has secured reliable manufacturing capabilities to support its ambitious AI plans, marking a significant milestone in building a robust local semiconductor ecosystem capable of withstanding global supply chain disruptions.”*****Huawei’s announcement coincided with a recent plethora of revelations about advances in AI chips led by Chinese firms from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Baidu Inc. The drumbeat of news is remarkable given most of the country’s firms have for years kept their cutting-edge technology a secret, to avoid drawing Washington’s scrutiny. They’re emerging in rapid succession as Beijing puts chip policy at the center of delicate talks with the US....
....MUCH MORE, they pull together quite a bit of news that came out over the last week or so.
This is the one Nvidia's Jensen Huang thinks about
As noted earlier this year:
What Huawei has accomplished is astounding and borderline terrifying....
