China bypasses US sanctions and creates its own analogues of AI chips
Financial Times journalists discovered on satellite images 3 previously unknown factories located near the Huawei company base. According to insiders, these enterprises produce the latest chips for artificial intelligence. This is AI Ascend 910D. Interestingly, the construction of these facilities began immediately after the US imposed the first technological sanctions against China.
And rumors are spreading on social networks that Huawei’s new chips may surpass the H100 model from Nvidia in performance. This is the current standard for training large language models. Moreover, there is information that the Chinese DeepSeek-R2 model is already being trained on AI Ascend cards.
Financial Times sources claim that all 3 discovered factories are built in the same architectural style and receive subsidies from the Chinese government. And supposedly this indicates that the development of proprietary chips for artificial intelligence has become a national priority for China. Probably the next shocking discovery will be that all Chinese government institutions use the same flag.
The situation is especially important against the background of current restrictions. Currently, the import of top-tier Blackwell series graphics cards to China is prohibited. Which creates a serious shortage of computing power for Chinese technology companies and startups working in the field of artificial intelligence. If AI Ascend chips can indeed replace H100 graphics cards in terms of characteristics, this could radically change the balance of power in the global artificial intelligence race. Chinese companies will gain access to computing power comparable to that used by their Western competitors. But without dependence on American manufacturers.
Experts note that such technological import substitution is a long-term trend in the Chinese economy. Which began long before the current deterioration of relations with the US. However, it is now that this strategy is beginning to bring concrete results in the most sensitive areas of high technology. Well, the question remains whether the characteristics of Chinese chips actually correspond to the declared parameters. An objective assessment can only be given after the appearance of independent tests and real examples of using this equipment in complex artificial intelligence tasks.
