Huawei Unveils Ascend 950PR AI Chip, Seizing Half of China's Accelerator Market as Nvidia Retreats

Huawei is unveiling new AI accelerator technology this week to advance its bid to replace Nvidia as the dominant supplier of AI chips in China, drawing a stark line across the global semiconductor divide. The company's Ascend 950PR chip, now in mass production, delivers 1.56 petaflops of FP4 compute performance alongside 112 gigabytes of proprietary HiBL 1.0 memory and 1.4 terabytes per second of bandwidth. The single-die design achieves approximately 2.87 times the FP4 performance of Nvidia's H20 accelerator and reaches approximate parity with the H100 for inference workloads—a significant advantage because Nvidia's most powerful chips remain unavailable in China due to US export controls.