Editor’s take: The Trump administration tried to curb China’s skill to advance its computing capabilities by way of tariffs and different commerce restrictions. Nonetheless, this unprecedented commerce struggle could have as a substitute pushed Beijing to speed up its efforts in creating highly effective new AI techniques.
As newly appointed US tech czar David Sacks predicted only a month in the past, Trump’s tariffs look like backfiring in spectacular trend. Chinese language tech large Huawei is reportedly creating a strong AI system that may already compete with Nvidia’s most superior infrastructure within the race for the world’s quickest AI platforms.
Huawei publicly unveiled its new system, the CloudMatrix 384, on the latest World Synthetic Intelligence Convention in Shanghai. The three-day occasion was filled with firms showcasing their newest AI improvements, and in keeping with Reuters, Huawei’s sales space was among the many most crowded and talked-about on the present.
Many attendees have been desperate to study extra concerning the CloudMatrix 384, however Huawei officers declined to offer additional particulars. Whereas the system could have been on show primarily to generate buzz, sufficient info has emerged to present us a clearer sense of the place Huawei – and China’s broader AI business – is likely to be heading.
Based on a latest research by SemiAnalysis, Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 is the corporate’s reply to Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 – a flagship AI supersystem designed to run trillion-parameter fashions in actual time. Nvidia’s answer consists of 36 Grace CPUs and 72 Blackwell GPUs, working collectively in a unified rack to perform as a single huge GPU that dramatically accelerates massive language mannequin inference.
Whereas Huawei lags behind Nvidia and different Western corporations in superior silicon design, its engineers selected to compensate with scale and innovation reasonably than uncooked pace. The CloudMatrix 384 incorporates 384 Ascend 910C chips, interconnected in an all-to-all topology to maximise efficiency. The Ascend 910C, designed by Huawei’s personal fabless semiconductor arm HiSilicon, successfully combines two Ascend 910B processors to ship efficiency on par with Nvidia’s H100 GPU.
A totally configured CloudMatrix 384 can attain 300 petaFLOPs of dense BF16 compute, practically double the compute capability of Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72. It additionally boasts 3.6× larger complete reminiscence capability and a pair of.1× extra reminiscence bandwidth.
SemiAnalysis famous in April that with additional yield enhancements, Huawei could quickly outpace Nvidia – and by extension, america – within the AI race. The main caveat? Energy consumption. The CloudMatrix 384 requires greater than 4 occasions the vitality wanted to run a GB200 NVL72 at full capability.
Nonetheless, in contrast to many Western nations, China has been aggressively increasing its energy technology infrastructure utilizing coal, photo voltaic, hydro, wind, and different sources.
