How Huawei challenges Nvidia's dominance and changes the global market

chiny24.com 1 month ago

A fresh chapter in technological competition

The technological war between the United States and China, frequently seen by the prism of customs and trade barriers, is actually at a much deeper level – at the heart of innovation, specified as semiconductors. The export restrictions imposed by the US on advanced AI chips, in peculiar those manufactured by Nvidia, were intended to slow down Chinese advancement in the field of artificial intelligence. However, fresh events from September 2025 show that this strategy, alternatively of weakening, could have become a powerful catalyst for the Chinese technological revolution. Beijing not only does not intend to give up, but even accelerates, developing its own powerful alternatives. This counteroffensive is led by Huawei, which, with its latest announcements, poses a direct challenge to Nvidia's dominance and can permanently change the power arrangement on the global market.

Chinese Sanctions Response: Huawei offensive

Faced with expanding force and limited access to the latest Nvidia processors, China has set itself on a strategy of technological self-sufficiency. Huawei plays a key function in this process, which presented an ambitious improvement plan at the Huawei Connect 2025 conference in Shanghai to make the country independent of abroad supplies. The company, for years hardened by American sanctions, not only survived, but besides built awesome capabilities in designing and producing its own chips.

The latest Huawei announcements focus on 2 pillars: the improvement of a fresh generation of Ascend AI processors and the construction of unprecedentedly powerful computing systems known as SuperPoDs and SuperClusters.

New generation of Ascend chips: A roadmap for independence

For the first time in years Huawei has publically presented a detailed, three-year road map for its AI chips, which is simply a clear signal to throw the Nvidia and AMD glove. The plan involves the launch of successive generation processors:

Ascend 950: Available in 2 variants in 2026 (950PR and 950DT), it has to offer competitive performance. Keyly, it will usage the author's high-capacity memory (HBM), thus bypassing 1 of the main bottlenecks in the Chinese supply chain.
Ascend 960 and 970: Planned for 2027 and 2028 respectively, they are to proceed the trend of expanding computing power and efficiency, demonstrating a long-term imagination and ability to compete with the improvement cycles of American giants.

Revealing these plans is simply a strategical decision that is to “educate the market” and show that Huawei is able to match Nvidia's many-year plans. Furthermore, the company stresses that its strategy is based on production processes that are already available in mainland China to guarantee the stableness and sustainable improvement of computing capacity in the future.

SuperPoDs and SuperClusters: Power on a Scale

However, a real change in paradigm is not so much the performance of individual chips as the ability to combine them into huge, coherent systems. Huawei understood that even if individual processors give way to any of the latest Nvidia models, their mass connection in the cluster can offset this difference.

The company presented 2 fresh systems:

Atlas 950 SuperPoD: A strategy capable of integrating 8 192 Ascend chips, which is expected to hit the marketplace in the 4th fourth of 2026.
Atlas 960 SuperPoD: An even more powerful version, serving 15,488 Ascend processors, planned for the end of 2027.

These “supernodes” are in practice single, logical computers composed of thousands of physical machines, capable of shared learning and processing on an unprecedented scale. Moreover, Huawei announced plans for the construction SuperClusters, i.e. systems composed of many SuperPoDs. Atlas 950 Super Cluster is designed to integrate more than 520,000 chips, and Atlas 960 Super Cluster – more than a million.

According to the company's declaration, these systems are to exceed in terms of key performance metrics all publically known competition plans for the coming years. To meet the challenges of communication in specified large systems, Huawei has developed its own connection protocol called UnifiedBus.

Not only Huawei: The full ecosystem on its way to self-sufficiency

Although Huawei is simply a leader, he is not alone in his quest to become independent of Nvidia technology. another Chinese technology giants, specified as Alibaba and Baidu, besides intensively make their own AI processors. According to reports, Zhenwu's Alibaba chip has already achieved performance comparable to H20 – a special, little advanced version of the Nvidii processor created for the Chinese market.

This change of strategy is simply a direct consequence to the Beijing government's actions, which actively encourages and even pushes national companies to quit buying Nvidia chips for native solutions. Analysts from Bernstein foretell that the share of home AI chips in the Chinese marketplace will emergence from 17% in 2023 to 55% by 2027, showing the scale of the upcoming change.

Expert opinions: Skepticism and recognition

The reactions of analysts to Huawei's ambitious plans are mixed, but with the advantage of tones indicating the increasing strength of China in this sector.

David Sacks, White home AI adviser, stated that fresh reports from China send a clear message: “China is not desperate about our chips. They produce their own and intend to compete in the global semiconductor market“. He noted that although Nvidia inactive has an advantage in the performance of individual chips, Huawei makes up for these shortcomings by utilizing its experience in network technologies to make powerful clusters.
Kevin Xu, founder of the investment firm Interconnected Capital, believes that the Huawei road map “educates the market” and signals that the Chinese company is able to match Nvidia's many-year plans.
However, there are besides skeptical voices. any experts point out that Chinese companies are inactive struggling with a little mature software ecosystem compared to the CUDA Nvidii platform, which can make higher maintenance costs and compatibility problems. Furthermore, although China is making progress, it is inactive falling behind in terms of the most advanced production processes.

Nevertheless, the overall consensus is that the technological gap between the US and China in the area of AI chips closes faster than many expected. Paradoxically, American sanctions that were expected to slow China have become a powerful catalyst for the improvement of their own independent technological ecosystem.

Conclusions: To the Bipolar planet AI

China's latest activities, with Huawei at the forefront, are a strategical consequence to an effort at technological isolation. alternatively of passively waiting for a softening of sanctions, Beijing and Chinese technology companies have set a extremist acceleration towards self-sufficiency. The “power on a scale” strategy, which involves building immense computing clusters, avoids temporary shortcomings in the performance of single chips and already challenges global leaders.

In the coming years, we can witness the birth of 2 parallel AI ecosystems: 1 based on American technology (with Nvidia at the head) and another focused around Chinese solutions. For the global market, this means fragmentation, but for China, a chance to build a resilient and competitive manufacture that could endanger the current dominance of the United States in the long term. The war on chips is far from over, but its latest chapter shows that China's determination to prosecute technological sovereignty brings tangible results.

Source:

Data Centre Magazine (2025-09-19). How Powerful are Huawei’s fresh SuperPoDs and SuperClusters?
Reuters (2025-09-17). Huawei unveils chipmaking, computing power plans for the first time.
South China Morning Post (2025-09-20). Huawei’s AI chip road map Bolsters China’s tech self-sufficiency efforts.
Huawei (2025-09-18). Groundbreaking SuperPoD Interconnect: Leading a fresh Paradigm for AI Infrastructure.
RCR Wireless News (2025-09-19). Huawei unveils fresh offering for AI infra at Shanghai event.
Huawei Central (2025-09-18). Huawei’s world-class AI supernode coming in Q4 2025 to rival Nvidia’s dominance.
ComputerWeekly.com (2025-09-19). Huawei unveils interconnects to address large-scale AI infrastructure bottles.

Leszek B. Glass

Email: [email protected]

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