Baidu placed AI chip order from Huawei in shift away from Nvidia

It's kinda to be expected. US export controls are preventing the sale of NVida chips to Chinese companies. Those companies can either adapt or go out of business. So, they are adapting. China also have a sizable semi-conductor industrial base; so, we should expect to see some switch to domestic production to de-risk their supply chain. While it will be a long time (if ever) for that domestic production capability to catch up with US based companies, the current situation does give them an incentive and source of funding to try. It will be interesting to see, going forward, if Huawei can improve on their technology and processes to challenge NVidia.

Last month, during iFlyTek's earnings call, Senior Vice President Jiang Tao once again said the Ascend 910B's capabilities were "comparable to Nvidia's A100".

The A100 is widely considered to be about half the performance of Nvidia's newest H100. More importantly for LLMs, it's limited to about half the memory of the H100.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Nov 7 (Reuters) - Baidu (9888.HK) ordered artificial intelligence chips from Huawei (HWT.UL) this year, two people familiar with the matter said, adding to signs that U.S. pressure is prompting Chinese acceptance of the firm's products as an alternative to Nvidia's.

Although Huawei's Ascend chips are still seen as far inferior to Nvidia's in terms of performance, the first source said they were the most sophisticated domestic option available in China.

In August, the two companies said they would deepen compatibility between Baidu’s Ernie AI model and Huawei’s Ascend chips.

Analysts predicted last month that the U.S. curbs would create an opening for Huawei to expand in its $7 billion home market.

The order adds to signs of technological advances for Huawei, as Beijing pours investment into its domestic semiconductor industry to help it catch up with overseas peers and urges state-owned firms to replace foreign technology with domestic alternatives.

In September, Reuters reported that Huawei's in-house chip design unit, HiSilicon, had commenced shipments of newly developed Chinese-made processors for surveillance cameras to clients in 2023 in another comeback sign.

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