Huawei's Ascend 910C Chip Achieves Profitability with 40% Yield
Shenzhen, Wednesday, 26 February 2025.
Huawei’s Ascend 910C processor reaches a crucial 40% yield milestone, marking the production line’s first profitability. Aiming for a 60% yield, Huawei enhances its competitive edge in AI chip manufacturing.
Significant Manufacturing Progress
In a remarkable development for China’s semiconductor industry, Huawei has doubled its Ascend 910C chip yield from 20% to nearly 40% over the past year [1][2]. The chip, manufactured using SMIC’s 7nm (N+2) process, represents a crucial breakthrough in domestic AI chip production, making the Ascend production line profitable for the first time [3].
Ambitious Production Targets
Looking ahead to 2025, Huawei has set aggressive production goals, planning to manufacture 100,000 Ascend 910C chips and 300,000 Ascend 910B chips [4]. This marks a significant increase from 2024, when the company produced 200,000 910B units while the 910C was not yet in production [4]. The company now dominates China’s AI chip sector, accounting for over 75% of the country’s total AI chip production [2].
Performance Benchmarks
The Ascend 910C demonstrates competitive performance metrics, achieving approximately 60% of the inference performance of Nvidia’s H100 GPU [5]. While still trailing behind Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell AI chips, this performance level indicates substantial progress in China’s efforts to develop domestic AI processing capabilities [5]. Industry analyst Austin Lyons notes that the chip’s commercial viability at 40% yield is comparable to TSMC’s 60% yield for NVIDIA’s H100 AI processor [4].
Market Implications
The yield improvement comes at a crucial time in the global semiconductor market. For context, NVIDIA earned $12 billion from selling one million H20 chips in China during 2024, with these modified chips providing less than 15% of the AI computing power of the standard H100 [4]. Huawei’s advancement in chip production capability could significantly alter the competitive landscape, especially given ongoing U.S. export controls that restrict NVIDIA’s ability to sell advanced H100 AI chips in China [4].