Huawei's Ascend AI chip 910B has more than 5,000 pre-orders, replacing NVIDIA GPUs!
As we all know, in the field of high-end artificial intelligence chips, Nvidia has no rivals in the world.
Although NVIDIA's high-end A100 and H100 AI chips cannot be sold in Chinese mainland, and can only sell castrated chips of H800 and A800, because the castrated H800 and A800 performance are still very strong, domestic companies still purchase a large number of them.
Data shows that by 2023, about 80% of domestic cloud computing companies may purchase high-end artificial intelligence chips from NVIDIA.
However, in October last year, the United States tightened the ban again, and even the H800 and A800 were banned, so Nvidia was in a hurry and had to say that it was going to launch a special edition of the chip, which were HGX H20 and L20, L2 GPUs.
On the one hand, Nvidia does not want to lose the huge market of China, after all, Nvidia accounts for about 20% of its revenue from China. On the other hand, Nvidia is also worried that Chinese manufacturers will launch their own artificial intelligence chips to replace their own chips, so there may be no chance in the future.
The Chinese manufacturer that was able to launch an AI chip to replace NVIDIA is Huawei, which, according to an earlier statement by KDDI, has its own AI chip, Rise, which is on par with the NVIDIA A100.
Some time ago, it was reported that Huawei's Ascend chip 910B has received orders from major customers for at least 5,000 units in 2023 and is scheduled to be delivered in 2024. And this Ascend 910B is currently the closest Chinese alternative to the Nvidia A100.
It is not yet known who this big customer is, but you can look at the news that was sent some time ago about which manufacturers started buying Huawei AI chips, and you should be able to roughly identify some of them.
In fact, the reason why people buy Huawei AI chips instead of Nvidia chips is simple.
First of all, the hgx h20 and nvidia's l20, l2 gpu is really castrated too much, the stronger h20 and h100 compared to the performance, the performance is emasculated by 80%, * it's the same, how do you say users can afford it?
Secondly, the vast majority of enterprises are naturally more willing to choose national artificial intelligence chips under the premise of national choice, which is more secure, otherwise what will happen after the supply is cut off?
In addition, in addition to Huawei's artificial intelligence chips, which are favored by domestic enterprises, it is reported that Alibaba is also developing its own artificial intelligence chips"Han Guang", which will then replace Nvidia's chips with its own artificial intelligence chips.
It can be seen that the development of things is indeed as Nvidia did before, after the ban on artificial intelligence chips to China, China's own artificial intelligence chips will increase, and the United States may permanently lose this market opportunity.
The next thing to look at is the development of Huawei's AI chips in 2024, but some people say that due to the current chip production capacity problem, Huawei's Kirin chips, Shengteng chips, and Kunpeng chips are all waiting for production capacity, so Huawei's chips may be scarce for a period of time in the future.