Huawei on track to sell inference chips worth $12bn thiscyear.

Most of the orders are for the Ascend 950PR which entered mass production in March and is aimed at inference.

Although Huawei’s chips are a couple of nodes behind the leaders, Huawei uses them in large clusters which off-sets the performance disadvantages of the individual chips.

The China government has told local companies to limit their use of Nvidia chips and support local suppliers while US regulations on the export of Nvidia H200 chip have held up it’s availability in China.

Huawei’s chips are made by SMIC which will bring on two new fabs this year. 

“The day that DeepSeek comes out on Huawei first, that is a horrible outcome for our nation -AI models around the world are developed and they run best on non-American hardware,” said Nvidia’s Jensen Huang recently.  

Morgan Stanley forecasts China’s AI chip market will reach $67 billion in 2030, with 86% supplied by Chinese companies. This year domestic suppliers are expected to sell  $21 billion  worth of AI chips.