Huawei is building a production line for advanced chips in Shenzhen, the FT has reported, citing satellite imagery obtained by the news outlet.
Three manufacturing sites are currently under construction in the district of Guanlan, having received financial backing from the Shenzhen government, the report claims.
Huawei is believed to be operating one of the sites to manufacture its 7nm smartphone and Ascend AI processors. Construction is thought to have begun in 2022, with the FT reporting that chip equipment maker SiCarrier and memory-chip maker SwaySure are responsible for operating the other two sites.
Given ongoing export restrictions of advanced semiconductor technologies to China, in addition to developing domestically-made chips to serve as alternatives to advanced offerings such as those being produced by Nvidia, Chinese companies are also believed to be involved in efforts to develop technology that can also rival ASML, SK Hynix, and TSMC.
While the FT reports that Huawei denies links to the two companies, the news outlet claims SiCarrier was spun out of a Huawei lab and SwaySure supplies Huawei with memory chips for cars and consumer electronics.
Details of Huawei’s incoming AI chips were first reported on last month. The company’s Ascend 920 AI chips are produced using 6nm process node technology and is expected to offer more than 900 teraflops (BF16 performance) per card, whilst boasting 4Tbps of memory bandwidth.
Huawei is also expected to start mass shipping its Ascend 910C AI chip – the Ascend 920’s predecessor – to Chinese customers from May. The Ascend 910C reportedly delivers approximately 60 percent of the inference performance of the Nvidia H100 by combining two 910B processors into a single package.
While the Ascend 920 is expected to challenge Nvidia’s H20 GPUs, which have recently been subject to additional US export restrictions, the Wall Street Journal has since reported that Huawei is also developing Ascend 910D chips, which it expects to rival Nvidia’s H100 GPUs.
According to the WSJ, Huawei has approached Chinese tech companies to test its Ascend 910D chips. No technical information beyond the expectation they will match the performance of H100s has been reported on.
Since the start of his second term in office, President Trump pledged to “return production” of computer chips and semiconductors to the United States by imposing a “100 percent tax” on their overseas production, claiming that tariffs would incentivize companies to manufacture chips in the US instead of Taiwan.
Despite this, the President has yet to impose any tariffs on semiconductors.
