Huawei's Ascend chips are replacing Nvidia's market dominance in China as the company reduces dependence on US technology due to export controls.

Huawei has claimed it successfully weaned itself off American technology, from chips to software. The process remains gradual, however, and the company acknowledges challenges in achieving global adoption of its processors and operating system.

According to Huawei's estimate, its Ascend AI chips now outsell Nvidia's in China. The company released a transcript of its meeting with reporters at the Huawei Connect conference, where rotating chairman Eric Xu made the claim.

Xu noted that while Ascend cannot match Nvidia in raw performance per chip, it compensates through sheer volume. At the conference, Huawei unveiled the Atlas 950 SuperPoD, built on the company's new Peerium architecture. Unlike traditional designs with master and slave components, Peerium connects CPUs, NPUs, memory, SSDs, network cards, and switches as equal peers.

The architecture aims to make thousands or even tens of thousands of processors function as a single system, though supply remains the primary constraint. Xu acknowledged that Huawei cannot meet even Chinese demand, and therefore has no plans to export Ascend AI chips internationally, though select countries with strong demand receive limited quantities.

Analysts told Bloomberg that Huawei still lags Nvidia technologically, with even the latest Ascend chips delivering only a fraction of Nvidia's performance. Huawei counters that massive clustering and faster interconnects can bridge this gap.

Though Huawei's chips may fall short of expectations, the company's abundant supply led Xu to call for complete semiconductor supply chain self-sufficiency as the essential path forward. Consumer chief Richard Yu was equally direct about manufacturing challenges. Extreme ultraviolet machines are critical for advanced chips, Yu said, and while China is developing them, the country currently relies on deep ultraviolet technology. Huawei's solution is LogicFolding, part of its Tau law approach, employed in the Kirin 9050 chips in the Mate 90 Pro Max. The company projects that Tau law chips will match the transistor density of a 1.4 nm process by 2031—an ambitious target given current semiconductor manufacturing capabilities.

Software represents the other pillar of Huawei's independence from American technology. HarmonyOS now powers phones, tablets, wearables, PCs, and cars, with Huawei reporting over 90 million devices, 450,000 applications and services, and 11 million developers.

Yu confirmed that a broader push for an Android alternative is under consideration, but stressed that Huawei plans a gradual global rollout of HarmonyOS. He noted that Windows Phone, Samsung's bada, and Nokia's Symbian all failed despite their established positions, whereas Huawei succeeded in building HarmonyOS despite entering later—positioning it as a third mobile software ecosystem alongside iOS and Android.