{"id":1534029,"date":"2025-05-04T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-04T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1534029"},"modified":"2025-05-04T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-05-04T22:00:00","slug":"escobar-china-steps-up-its-game-in-the-global-ai-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/escobar-china-steps-up-its-game-in-the-global-ai-race\/1534029\/","title":{"rendered":"Escobar: China Steps Up Its Game In The Global AI Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Escobar: China Steps Up Its Game In The Global AI Race<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Pepe Escobar,<\/em><\/p>\n

Late next month, Huawei will be testing its new powerful AI processor, the Ascend 910 D, even as by early May the previous 910C will start to be mass-delivered to scores of Chinese tech companies.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

These serious breakthroughs are the next chapter of Huawei\u2019s drive to counter Nvidia\u2019s global monopoly in GPUs. The Ascend 910D is supposed to be more powerful than Nvidia\u2019s extremely popular H100.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Huawei is pulling no punches in its race to manufacture a new generation of processors. Huawei has collaborated with SMIC \u2013 China\u2019s largest semiconductor foundry \u2013 to apply Deep Ultraviolet Lithography (DUV) on what was previously only possible on EUV (Extreme Ultra-Violet technology). Once again, Huawei and SMIC defied the\u00a0proverbial American \u201cexperts\u201d<\/a>\u00a0with creative engineering solutions.<\/p>\n

Huawei arrived at fabricating 5nm chips with DUV even as the process is more expensive than with EUV. If Huawei had access to EUV they would be already manufacturing 2-3nm chips. That will come, in short time, as both China and Russia, under permanent US high-tech blockade, must by all means develop their own EUV technology.<\/p>\n

Shanghai geeks are convinced that Huawei will switch on 6G networksbefore the end of the decade. Their current breathless drive is not just aimed at the smartphone front \u2013 where Huawei is peerless; the new Huawei Mate 70 Pro + is by far the absolute top smartphone in the world, running on Harmony OS. Huawei is looking at cloud computing, AI and enterprise servers \u2013 and to become no less than the core player in the AI infrastructure race.<\/p>\n

Ditching Any Reliance on American Technology<\/h2>\n

Earlier this month, Huawei introduced the CloudMatrix 384, a system connecting 384 Ascend 910C chips. The tech word in Shanghai is that this configuration, under certain conditions, and of course consuming much more power, already outperforms Nvidia\u2019s flagship rack system \u2013 which is powered by 72 Blackwell chips.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Huawei\u2019s Kirin X chip is targeting the PC market, offering stiff competition to Apple, AMD, Intel and Qualcom while Harmony OS plus removes the necessity of using US software such as Microsoft and Android.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shanghai geeks swear that China essentially doesn\u2019t need to beat Nvidia or other US chips developers. After all, China already has the largest consumer market in the world – by volume and by value. If a parallel tech universe is the likely result of the Trump Tariff Tizzy (TTT), so be it. China already controls over 60% of the global gadget consumer market.<\/p>\n

Kirin X may not – yet – match the power of Nvidia\u2019s H100 GPUs. But Huawei chips are already the real deal for every Chinese company which is following the new Beijing-defined direction to reduce any reliance on American technology.<\/p>\n

All of the above naturally brings us to the enormous AI elephant in the (digital) room: Nvidia.<\/p>\n

A recent book,\u00a0The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and The World\u2019s Most Coveted Microchip<\/em>, is quite helpful to track not only the personal story of CEO superstar Huang, a Taiwanese who played the American Dream to the hilt and became a tech multi-billionaire, but Nvidia\u2019s enviable tech accomplishments.<\/p>\n

Huang does not interpret AI as emergent machine superintelligence, and firmly dismisses any direct analogy to biology. For this all-round pragmatist, AI is merely software \u2013 running on hardware that his company sells for a fortune.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Still, Nvidia has ventured into virgin territory way beyond the American biz-tech Valhalla, complete with holding the most valuable stock on the planet: arguably, when it comes to AI, Nvidia unveiled a new phase of evolution.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s crucial to understand how Huang sees China. <\/strong>It is indeed a key market for his AI chips \u2013 and he wants to keep selling them in droves. Trump\u2019s tariffs though make sure that won\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s what moved Huang to ditch his proverbial leather jackets and don a crisp business suit for a strategic visit to Beijing, where he affirmed the sacred importance of the Chinese market, whatever the new Trump-dictated gimmicks.<\/p>\n

By 2022, the China market represented 26% of Nvidia\u2019s business; this year, it has fallen to 13%, because of euphemistic \u201ctechnology export controls\u201d.<\/p>\n

The problem is the US government, already by 2022, under the previous automatic pen administration, had blocked sales to China of advanced A100 and H100 chips. Nvidia started selling modified versions \u2013 and even after the ban chips continued to arrive in China. By June 2023, it was easy to find A100s for double their price in the black market in Shenzhen.<\/p>\n

Huang is convinced that \u201cno AI should be able to learn without a human in the loop\u201d \u2013 even as he admitted, two years ago, that \u201creasoning capability is two or three years out\u201d. Translation: according to Huang AI will start thinking for itself within the next few months.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even as Nvidia prepares to invest billions of dollars to build AI supercomputers in Texas, the Chinese essentially are not losing any sleep on \u201cthinking AI\u201d: their focus is extremely practical, to conquer not only the Chinese market but also the supply chains of most of Eurasia.<\/p>\n

The US National Security Council has concluded that it\u2019s too dangerous for China to buy Nvidia\u2019s high-end chips, even the H20 \u2013 designed for the Chinese market. Huawei, anyway, already produces chips somewhat comparable to the H20.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Huang is losing his sleep because, essentially, Nvidia is losing the immense Chinese market to Huawei \u2013 with Trump\u2019s direct input. Nvidia has tens of thousands of H20s specially designed for China which they simply cannot sell. Each chip cost between $12,000 to $20,000.<\/p>\n

How China Is Opening a Digital \u201cPandora\u2019s Box\u201d<\/h2>\n

Huawei\u2019s new drive is yet another example of Chinese will capable of staring down any challenge \u2013 based on indigenous talent, tech expertise and national pride. The record, even before Trump 1.0 sanctions, shows that Huawei does eat massive uphill battles for breakfast. In fact Ascend in many aspects was ahead of Nvidia as early as in 2019 \u2013 and that’s why two different US administrations banned it.<\/p>\n

China is already light years ahead of the US on chip research.<\/strong> Chinese universities amass most places in the global Top Ten for published papers on semiconductors and on citations \u2013 a distinction shared, among others, by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (number one), Tsinghua University (one of China\u2019s top two universities), the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (number four), and Nanjing, Zhejiang and Pekin Universities.<\/p>\n

Two weeks ago in Shanghai I first heard that Huawei would catch up with US semiconductor giants in maximum two years. Now, after the announcement of the Ascend 910D, the buzz shifted to only one year for China to overtake Nvidia and develop better lithography machines than the ones currently produced by ASML.<\/p>\n

And the debate is fast switching to how far Huawei will be able to go within the next 2 to 3 years.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In several aspects we are already in the early stages of a US-China tech decoupling. For years Nvidia has dominated the AI hardware space. Their GPUS are the brains behind most contemporary advanced AI. The H100 chip is the gold\/platinum standard for AI infrastructure worldwide. Nvidia\u2019s chips had huge demand from Chinese tech giants \u2013 Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Bytedance.<\/p>\n

Soon that may not be the case \u2013 and that goes way beyond Nvidia\u2019s certified loss of market share in China. China is now all out focused on building a successful, self-sufficient AI hardware ecosystem. The coup de grace will be to restrict the export of all rare earth minerals to the US. Huaweii then will pull up in no time.<\/p>\n

Everyone remembers how DeepSeek R1 wiped out over $1 trillion from Wall Street only three months ago.<\/strong> DeepSeek R2 will be released soon; training was a whopping 97% cheaper than OpenAI. And training happened on Huawei\u2019s Ascend. No Nvidia.<\/p>\n

Quantum Bird, a world-class physicist formerly with the CERN in Geneva, puts everything in much needed context. He stresses how indigenous chip development by China \u2013 and in a near future, Russia and probably India \u2013 is \u201cmulti-faceted; what we are observing are the initial stages of a redefinition of the notion of recognizing patterns and machine learning, technologies that are popularly referred to as \u2018AI\u2019 by the media.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nvidia chips, Qantum Bird remarks, are indeed \u201ccomputational beasts\u201d, but they work better around \u201cprocessing models and workloads typical of \u2018AI\u2019 models developed by Western scientists.\u201d DeepSeek\u2019s development, on the other hand, showed a transgression of established models: \u201cThe possibilities opened for performance leaps are huge, even using relatively modest hardware, with alternative approaches based on advanced math and different calculus flows.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a nutshell: \u201cThis is the Pandora\u2019s box that Nvidia now fears the Chinese may have opened\u201d. And that totally ties in with Huang\u2019s red alert, prompting his visit to Beijing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We may be heading indeed towards a serious tech decoupling. Or as Quantum Bird frames it: \u201cA technological and scientific divergence medium and long-term. If the architectures that emerge from these developments are incompatible when it comes to their usage on specific \u2018AI\u2019 models, Nvidia will lose its global monopoly and will become just a company reduced to a corporate\/scientific Western niche.\u201d<\/p>\n

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nSun, 05\/04\/2025 – 14:00<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/technology\/escobar-china-steps-its-game-global-ai-race<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Even as Huawei, from its privileged base in the Chinese market, will go on to win most markets across the\u00a0Global Majority \u2013 from BRICS to BRI<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n