Despite economic and technological sanctions, HUAWEI reportedly received AI chips from TSMC for its HiSilicon Ascend 910 series through proxy companies. These chips, originally produced by TSMC, are vital to Huawei’s AI development but cannot be directly purchased due to the restrictions. The Ascend 910C is built using two Ascend 910B chips, with the latter originally manufactured using TSMC’s 7nm process before sanctions prevented direct production.
Though Huawei has faced low production yields, with only 40% of chips being functional, it continues to receive substantial quantities of these chips. However, the performance of the Ascend 910C, while adequate for inference tasks, falls short compared to AI chips like NVIDIA’s H100, limiting its use for machine learning tasks. Additionally, TSMC has now ceased supplying proxy companies, aiming to comply with international sanctions.
Source: TomHardware