Huawei Technologies is planning a major expansion of its AI chip output over the next year, aiming to strengthen its foothold in the world’s largest semiconductor market at a time when Nvidia is struggling with trade restrictions. According to people familiar with the matter, Huawei intends to produce about 600,000 units of its flagship Ascend 910C chips in 2025, nearly double this year’s total. By 2026, overall output of the Ascend line could rise to 1.6 million dies, including stockpiled chips and projections based on manufacturing yields. This marks a significant step forward for Huawei, long seen as China’s best chance to reduce reliance on foreign semiconductor technology restricted by U.S. sanctions.

Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and DeepSeek require millions of AI chips to power their services. Nvidia, once the dominant supplier, has been hampered by U.S. export controls and failed to record sales of its H20 chips—designed for China—in the latest quarter. Huawei broke with its tradition of secrecy by unveiling a three-year roadmap to challenge Nvidia’s dominance. The plan includes rolling out successive Ascend chips—the 950, 960, and 970—by 2028. The current Ascend 910 series, however, remains the company’s primary revenue driver.

Despite progress, Huawei’s chips still trail Nvidia’s in performance. The upcoming Ascend 950 is estimated to deliver just 6% of the capability of Nvidia’s next-gen VR200 chip. Most major customers like Alibaba and Tencent currently use Huawei’s processors mainly for inferencing rather than training AI models. Huawei and its key manufacturing partner SMIC are using an advanced version of 7-nanometer technology, while Nvidia’s newest GPUs are made on cutting-edge 4nm nodes by TSMC. Nonetheless, Huawei has made packaging advances, such as combining multiple dies into a single chipset, which boosts power but poses manufacturing challenges.

Looking ahead, Huawei plans to launch a new chip, tentatively called the 910D, in late 2026. This design will pack four dies into a single chipset, with a target of 100,000 units. The company has also announced the 950DT for late 2026, with further iterations (960 in 2027 and 970 in 2028) already in the pipeline. To overcome performance gaps, Huawei is also developing large-scale networking solutions, including a new UnifiedBus interconnect protocol that can link up to 15,488 Ascend chips. Huawei’s scaling efforts could help Beijing’s broader goal of semiconductor self-sufficiency, though technical hurdles mean some next-generation chips may not arrive before 2027.