Huawei AI Chips: US Export Controls, Ascend 910C, NVIDIA Gap

Telecom equipment first, chips by necessity

Huawei was founded in Shenzhen in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former People's Liberation Army officer, and grew into a global supplier of telecom network infrastructure and smart devices, from 5G base stations to smartphones and laptops. As of the end of 2025 it reported roughly 213,000 employees, more than half of them in research and development, and R&D spending of CNY192.3 billion, about 21.8 percent of revenue. HiSilicon, its chip design arm, has been part of that business since long before AI chips became a geopolitical flashpoint. [1]

The Entity List, and what it did not stop

The US Commerce Department added Huawei to its Entity List in May 2019, requiring US suppliers to get a license before shipping most technology to the company, on national security grounds tied to its 5G equipment and alleged ties to the Chinese state. Huawei has denied being an instrument of Chinese government surveillance. [2]

In September 2023, a teardown of Huawei's new Mate 60 Pro smartphone found it ran on a Kirin 9000s chip built on a 7-nanometer process by SMIC, China's leading contract chipmaker, despite export controls meant to keep Chinese manufacturers off advanced process nodes. Independent analysts read it as evidence that sanctions had slowed China's chip industry without stopping it. [3]

In May 2024, the Commerce Department revoked licenses that had let Intel and Qualcomm ship laptop and handset chips to Huawei, with immediate effect. The revocation followed Huawei's launch, weeks earlier, of an AI-enabled laptop built on an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor, a product that drew scrutiny from congressional Republicans who questioned why a licensed US chip was still reaching a sanctioned company at all. [4][5]

Ascend, the Nvidia alternative China needs

Cut off from Nvidia's most capable AI chips, Huawei has positioned its own Ascend line, especially the 910C, as the domestic alternative Chinese AI labs and cloud providers rely on. Reuters reported in April 2025 that Huawei was preparing to mass-ship the 910C after further US export curbs on Nvidia's China-specific H20 chip narrowed what Chinese buyers could legally obtain. [6]

A December 2025 analysis from the Council on Foreign Relations, drawing on DeepSeek's own testing, put the 910C at roughly 60 percent of an Nvidia H100's performance despite comparable nominal specifications, and estimated US chips remained about five times more powerful overall, a gap it projected widening to seventeenfold by 2027. Production estimates for the 910C varied widely across sources it cited, from roughly 200,000 chips in 2025 by the Commerce Department's count to as many as 1.5 million dies by SemiAnalysis's, with memory supply cited as a binding constraint on how many finished chips that yields. [7]

Atlas interpretation: The pattern is that export controls did not stop Huawei from building AI chips; they set the terms of how far behind those chips run and how many China can produce. The Mate 60 Pro showed the ceiling was navigable at 7 nanometers. Ascend's roadmap, according to the same analysis, is bumping against manufacturing limits at that process node, which is a different problem than the one the controls were originally designed to solve. [3][7]