Although it is difficult for Chinese enterprises to match the performance of AI chips with Nvidia in the short term, some companies have begun to adopt locally produced AI chips under the policy of self-reliance of domestic chips.

Huawei hisilicon challenges Nvidia's leading position

Huawei is widely seen as posing the biggest threat to Nvidia. The Ascend 910B from Huawei's hisilicon Technology rivals Nvidia's A100 in terms of computing power, although overall performance falls short. Huawei Centeng 910B adopts the self-developed Ascend architecture, featuring large-scale parallel computing capabilities, high-speed communication and low latency.

Iflytek is the first company to adopt Centeng 910B chip, which has a leading position in the field of voice intelligence. Iflytek said that the current performance of Huawei Centeng 910B has been basically comparable to Nvidia A100, which shows that China's local chips are catching up in technology.

Tencent Suiyuan technology emerges

Tencent is Suiyuan's largest institutional shareholder with a 20 per cent stake. Suiyuan Technology is a deep learning startup, and its AI reasoning chip "Purple Xiao" launched in cooperation with Tencent is able to compete with some NVIDIA chips in performance. Tencent is promoting the Zixiao v1 as a cheaper alternative to the Huida A10, mainly for image and speech recognition AI applications.

In addition, Tencent also plans to launch a Purple Cloud v2Pro version, which is optimized for AI training and is expected to replace Nvidia's L40S chip, which is currently limited in the Chinese market. This shows that Chinese companies are trying to promote the wide application of local chips in different fields.

Haiguang Information Technology works with AMD

Haiguang Information Technology was founded in 2014, and the original technology was licensed from the US company AMD. The company focuses on the development of domestic server CPU chips and is currently promoting its newly released GPU Shenqian 2. It is worth noting that Haiguang information took into account the compatibility with Nvidia chip computing platform CUDA when designing GPU Shenyuan 2, providing mainland users with the flexibility to replace the chip.

Founded in August 2014, Yutian Lifei Technology Co., Ltd. is a comprehensive artificial intelligence enterprise with algorithms, chips and big data full-stack capabilities. The company's recently launched Deepedge10 chip is designed to be compatible with Nvidia's H20 chip, in an effort to meet demand from mainland customers ahead of Nvidia's chip changes.

Overcoming production constraints remains a challenge

Although Chinese chip designers are winning orders, increasing production capacity remains a big challenge. Most of China's advanced manufacturing technology and encapsulation capabilities are likely to be prioritized to meet Huawei's needs. This means that these new companies need to overcome production constraints in order to gain more room to grow in a highly competitive market.

In summary, the US restrictions on Nvidia gave birth to the rise of local Chinese IC designers, and major companies have entered the market, demonstrating China's rapid rise in the chip field ambition and strength.