Liza Lin
Appearances
WSJ What’s News
China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip to Rival Nvidia
Yeah, you're right on both counts, Luke. Although I would point out there's a third dimension to this, and it would be good to remind listeners on the background of Huawei.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip to Rival Nvidia
This Chinese tech company started out as a cell phone and telecom equipment maker, and Washington basically forced their hand and forced them to go all in with designing and producing chips when they cut Huawei off advanced American technology five years ago. They were once big buyers of Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel chips, and now they have to design, make their own, and now they're even selling it.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip to Rival Nvidia
And it's a huge addressable market. I mean, the timing really coincides with when US policymakers have made their latest move to try and cut China off the latest advanced US chips. the most recent one being the ban of NVIDIA's H20 chips into China.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip to Rival Nvidia
The H20 is not seen as the most top-end chip from NVIDIA, but it was the best chip available for sale by an American GPU or AI chipmaker into the country, and now these chips have been cut off. So now you have more willing buyers in China for Huawei chips than there were before.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip to Rival Nvidia
The first big one is production. Huawei can design such a fantastic chip, but realistically, can they produce it in the mass quantities needed, both for themselves, for internal use, and for external sales? That is a big question.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip to Rival Nvidia
Huawei's been cut off from the world's biggest and recognized as the best foundry, TSMC, and the Chinese equivalent of that, SMIC, S-M-I-C, is far from as efficient in terms of production as TSMC is. The next is production. that Huawei's chip design and chip making really still lags Nvidia.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip to Rival Nvidia
And we know this because sources tell us that in order to produce the 910D, what Huawei did was they used packaging methods to pack what is the equivalent of three to four existing mature chips together to make them more powerful. However, the eventual result is such a chip is a lot more power intensive and power hungry.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip to Rival Nvidia
So you can tell that in order for Huawei to catch up with Western peers such as Nvidia, they've had to overcompensate. I think one of my main takeaways from this story and from talking to people in China's chip space is not to get caught up in the fact that Huawei has had this innovation,
WSJ What’s News
China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip to Rival Nvidia
But to see bigger picture and realize that the Chinese chip industry is now at the point where within five to 10 years, it could become a formidable global force to its American rivals. It has got the right ecosystem and the supply chain to keep innovating in that direction.