Huawei Technologies’ new artificial intelligence (AI) computing system entrant, announced at a tech show in China this weekend, could rival NVIDIA Corp.’s most advanced offering and dominance in the field, according to a leading chips analyst.
Initially discussed in April, Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 is built on custom AI-optimized chips and high-speed interconnections to deliver multi-petaflop performance for large-scale model training that matches or exceeds the throughput of NVIDIA’s H100 GPUs, according to Huawei.
More significantly for Huawei, the launch signals an intensified push into global AI infrastructure, setting up a technological showdown with NVIDIA, which commands about 80% of the high-end AI accelerator market. But Huawei and Cerebras Systems Inc. are closing the gap, analysts suggest, and CloudMatrix 384 could appeal to Chinese cloud providers and enterprises seeking alternatives amid U.S. export restrictions on NVIDIA chips.
The CloudMatrix system’s design – it is powered by 384 of Huawei’s most sophisticated AI chips, the Ascend 910C graphics processing unit — illustrates Huawei’s strategy for taking on NVIDIA. Huawei refers to the approach as a “supernode” chip architecture, and claims it has developed high-speed network interconnection technology that lets the chips communicate with one another.
It is a philosophy that has convinced Dylan Patel, founder of semiconductor research group SemiAnalysis, to comment that Huawei has an AI system capable of surpassing NVIDIA.
Indeed, analysts and industry executives widely acknowledge Huawei as China’s most promising domestic supplier of chips essential for AI development despite the threat of crippling U.S. export restrictions. Most analysts view Huawei as a direct alternative to NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72, the chipmaker’s most advanced system-level product currently available in the market.
Even NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has called Huawei “one of the most formidable technology companies in the world,” and cautioned it could displace NVIDIA in China if the Trump Administration follows through with its export curbs on Beijing.
