China's AI Chip 'De-NVIDIA'…Huawei Surpasses NVIDIA

China's AI Chip 'De-NVIDIA'…Huawei Surpasses NVIDIA

BI Survey of 60 Companies…Ascend 910B/C Ranks First

Many Other Chinese Chips Also in Use

Chinese companies are rapidly switching to domestically produced artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductors instead of NVIDIA amidst conflicts with the United States, with Huawei's self-developed chips already found to be more widely used than NVIDIA products.

According to a survey conducted by Bloomberg Intelligence on July 7 (local time) targeting 60 executives from Chinese software, finance, manufacturing, and distribution companies, Huawei's 'Ascend 910B/C' had the highest combined trial adoption and evaluation rate of 65% among the 12 accelerators surveyed for the respondents' AI clusters.

This figure is higher than NVIDIA's China-specific chips 'H20/L20' (47%), which have reduced performance due to U.S. export controls, and older 'A800/H800' (47%). It also surpassed AMD's 'MI308' chip (55%).

Hygon's 'DCU' (52%) and Cambricon Technologies' 'MLU/SiYuan' (52%) also showed higher adoption and evaluation rates than NVIDIA chips.

Chips self-developed by large platform companies like Baidu's 'Kunlunxin' and Alibaba's 'T-Head' followed with 50%.

Moore Threads' 'MTT' (48%) and MetaX's 'C-series' (47%) were similar to or ahead of NVIDIA, and accelerators from emerging Chinese semiconductor companies like Iluvatar/Tianshu (38%), Enflame Cloudblazer (38%), and Biren BR100/104 (40%) are also undergoing significant review.

Chinese companies responded that they plan to allocate 46% of their AI accelerator budget to domestic products over the next 12 months. This is a significant increase from the current level of 30%.

80% of surveyed companies stated that their total infrastructure spending this year exceeded their budget due to the cost burden of AI-related projects.

The report assessed that "China's efforts to replace AI semiconductors with domestic products are making progress, which is likely to benefit domestic companies like Huawei and Hygon."

Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei, major AI infrastructure builders in China, were identified as the biggest beneficiaries of this transition.

NVIDIA products are still popular, but their market share is expected to shrink. Bloomberg reported that the H20 chip, which Chinese authorities have advised domestic tech companies to use sparingly, is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, and domestic companies are taking its place.

China is allocating approximately 2 trillion yuan (about 450 trillion won) for the construction of national data centers over the next five years, with the policy that at least 80% of key technologies, including semiconductors, will be supplied by domestic companies.

However, the report pointed out that the bottleneck is shifting from pure computing power to securing High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).

In this scenario, the growth of foundry companies like SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation) is expected to be constrained by a global memory supply shortage, while memory company Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is projected to benefit.