Huawei´s efforts to curb NVIDIA´s dominance in China´s Artificial Intelligence hardware market with its Ascend 910C GPUs are facing substantial resistance from the country´s top technology firms. ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have reportedly not committed to large-scale purchases of Huawei´s chips, highlighting the challenge of breaking free from the entrenched NVIDIA CUDA software ecosystem and addressing technical limitations of Huawei´s products.
A major obstacle for Huawei is the deep investment Chinese tech companies have made in NVIDIA´s CUDA platform, which offers a mature and feature-rich environment for developing Artificial Intelligence workloads. Huawei´s alternative, CANN (Compute Architecture for Neural Networks), lacks critical features and compatibility, making transitioning costly and time-consuming. Many industry leaders expect Huawei to adapt to their custom requirements, rather than overhauling existing infrastructures.
Reliability concerns also persist, as the Ascend 910C GPUs reportedly suffer from periodic overheating, further eroding confidence among potential buyers. In addition to technical reservations, competitive dynamics make leading technology firms wary of adopting a rival´s chips, slowing market uptake. Major companies have stockpiled NVIDIA GPUs over recent years, reducing the urgency to switch despite expanding US sanctions and export restrictions that have cast a shadow on Huawei hardware, especially for firms with significant global operations.
Huawei attempts to tackle functionality gaps by introducing products like the CloudMatrix 384, designed to rival NVIDIA´s high-performance Blackwell-based supercomputers. Nevertheless, the lack of direct support for memory-efficient formats like FP8 limits appeal, and stopgap solutions fail to match NVIDIA’s efficiency. While Huawei’s Ascend 910C’s headline specifications compete with NVIDIA’s H100 GPU, inertia from inventory, compliance risks, and insufficient developer community support further blunt its competitive edge. Meanwhile, NVIDIA continues to thrive, forecasting billions in Artificial Intelligence infrastructure revenue despite headwinds from Chinese sanctions.
