Huawei Technologies says it cannot produce enough artificial intelligence computing equipment to meet demand in China and is limiting overseas sales, underscoring the growth of its Ascend chip business as Beijing pushes to reduce the country’s dependence on Nvidia and other foreign technology.
Huawei’s rotating chairman Eric Xu said Thursday that the company had no plans to expand aggressively into international markets because its existing production capacity was insufficient even for Chinese customers.
“Since we don’t have enough capacity to even satisfy the demand in China, we don’t have a plan to expand into the international market in a fully-fledged way,” Xu told reporters at Huawei Connect in Shanghai.
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Huawei does supply some countries where demand is particularly strong, Xu said, but volumes remain limited. The comments suggest that the immediate market for Huawei’s AI infrastructure remains concentrated in China, where U.S. export restrictions have constrained access to Nvidia’s most advanced processors.
The capacity constraint also points to the scale of demand Huawei is seeing from Chinese technology companies developing and training increasingly sophisticated AI models. Xu said testing of Huawei’s Ascend 950DT processor had produced good results and that the company was in extensive discussions with Chinese AI developers. He expects many of those companies to begin training models on systems using the chip next year.
Huawei has emerged as one of the principal domestic alternatives to Nvidia as China accelerates efforts to establish a self-sufficient AI computing ecosystem. The company has faced U.S. trade restrictions since 2019, while Washington has separately tightened controls on exports of advanced AI chips and semiconductor technology to China.
Xu said reliable data on Nvidia’s share of China’s AI chip market was difficult to obtain, but offered his own assessment of Huawei’s position.
“I think Ascend market share should be bigger than Nvidia’s,” he said, without providing data to support the estimate.
Xu explicitly tied Huawei’s AI chip strategy to China’s broader push for technological self-reliance.
“We cannot accept a destiny where we cannot control our fate being determined by others in terms of willingness to sell chips to China or not,” he said.
“No matter if it’s for the Chinese government, industry in China, or for Huawei, it is certainly the way forward to try to push for full self-sufficiency for chips.”
Huawei has increasingly positioned computing infrastructure as a central part of its technology strategy. Guo Ping, chairman of Huawei’s supervisory board, said in remarks released this week that the company regarded AI as its “biggest opportunity” and wanted its computing and connectivity infrastructure to play a role comparable to Nvidia’s.
The company is accelerating its chip development schedule as it attempts to expand the performance of its domestic AI hardware.
Huawei said Thursday that its Ascend 960DT processor will be ready in the first quarter of 2027, three quarters earlier than previously planned. Its Ascend 960PR is scheduled for the third quarter of 2027, one quarter earlier than the previous timetable.
The company plans to release a new generation of Ascend processors each year, with the Ascend 970 and 980 scheduled for 2028 and 2029 respectively.
The faster development cycle comes as Chinese AI developers continue to demand greater computing capacity. Huawei’s approach is not simply to make individual processors more powerful. It is increasingly focused on connecting large numbers of processors so that they can function together as a much larger computing system.
Huawei said clusters containing about 100,000 chips have become standard for training some of the largest AI models. Communication between machines can consume more than 40% of training time in conventional server systems, according to the company, making the speed at which processors communicate an important constraint on overall computing performance.
Huawei’s response is a new architecture called Peerium, which is designed to allow as many as 1 million processors to operate together as a single system. Its UnifiedBus technology is intended to connect processors, memory, storage and networking equipment across those systems.
The company said its new Ascend 960 supernode can connect as many as 4,096 AI processors. Multiple supernodes can then be linked into clusters containing hundreds of thousands of processors, with the largest planned systems supporting as many as 1 million processors.
The strategy could allow Huawei to compensate, at least in part, for limitations in the performance and availability of individual domestic AI processors by combining large numbers of them and improving the efficiency of communication between machines.
Huawei said it has already deployed more than 1,000 systems using its earlier Ascend 910C processors, while Ascend 950 systems have entered commercial use. More than 5,200 developers are active each month on software for Ascend chips, and more than 40 AI models have been trained directly on Huawei’s computing platform, according to company materials.
Nvidia, however, retains a major advantage in software. Its CUDA platform is widely used by developers to build and run AI applications on Nvidia processors, creating an ecosystem that extends beyond the performance of the chips themselves.
Huawei’s challenge is therefore extending beyond producing processors. It must build enough hardware, improve the ability of large clusters to operate efficiently, and expand the software ecosystem needed by Chinese AI developers.
The effort has become necessary as U.S. restrictions limit Chinese access to advanced Nvidia processors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.