Huawei Unveils AI System to Challenge Nvidia's Flagship Model

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Huawei Technologies showed out its CloudMatrix 384 system, which they made a great deal out of. This system is made to do a lot of AI calculations quickly. The company is advertising the new device as a direct competitor to Nvidia's (NVDA, Financials) GB200 NVL72.

The CloudMatrix 384 system features 384 of Huawei's Ascend 910C chips, yet Nvidia's top product has only 72 chips. SemiAnalysis, a company that studies semiconductors, says that the architecture lets the system perform better overall, even though the per-chip measurements are lower.

Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis said in April that Huawei's design choices, like its supernode chip networking technology, could give them an advantage in performance. Zhang Pingan, the CEO of Huawei Cloud, announced in June that the system is already running on Huawei's cloud platform.

The launch underscores how significant Huawei is becoming in China's AI chip business, especially since the U.S. has limited exports. In May, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, told Bloomberg that Huawei was moving quite fast. He used the CloudMatrix project as an example.

Experts in the area think that Huawei's system is a strategic effort to make the company less dependent on other companies for AI infrastructure, which is vital for China's bigger tech aspirations.