U.S. restrictions and tariffs on Chinese language imports could harm American firms, notably those who promote semiconductors to China, in accordance with a report by The New York Instances. As firms like NVIDIA brace for potential losses, presumably as excessive as $5.5 billion from its H20 chip, Chinese language tech large Huawei is seizing the chance by getting ready a competing product.

Huawei readies Ascend 920 chip

Reuters reported on April 21 that Huawei has a brand new chip prepared for Chinese language firms that could be compelled to hunt an alternative choice to NVIDIA. The Ascend 920, first reported on by DigiTimes Asia, may substitute NVIDIA’s H20 when it turns into obtainable for buy within the second half of 2025.

In line with Tom’s {Hardware}, the Huawei Ascend 920 has 900 TFLOPs per card and a 4 TB/s reminiscence bandwidth, making it considerably extra highly effective than the NVIDIA H20. The H20 is a lower-power model of NVIDIA’s H100, constructed for the Chinese language market in accordance with U.S. restrictions. AMD additionally faces strict restrictions on gross sales to China.

Huawei competes throughout a large swath of the tech world, together with with Apple on smartphones and Ericsson and Nokia in telecommunications, in accordance with The New York Instances. Huawei may type a enterprise relationship with DeepSeek, serving to enhance its China-based superior AI efforts.

SEE: Microsoft added AI brokers to Copilot Studio, its instrument for customizing the AI Copilot.

Chip sanctions on China span Biden and Trump eras amid rising tech tensions

On April 15, the Trump administration restricted NVIDIA, Superior Micro Gadgets, and Intel from promoting chips to China. Days later, shares in all three firms fell. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang met with Chinese language leaders and mentioned the area’s significance to the corporate.

An nameless New York Instances supply mentioned China may use NVIDIA chips to construct information facilities as a part of the Belt and Street Initiative, a mushy energy initiative to plant Chinese language-backed infrastructure worldwide. Sanctions towards NVIDIA started in 2022 beneath former President Joe Biden’s administration to stop the sale of high-performance chips to China.

Now, with stress mounting on each side of the Pacific, the race to manage the way forward for AI and chipmaking is as a lot about geopolitics as it’s about silicon.