Nearly six years after the U.S. government placed Huawei Technologies on a trade blacklist, the Chinese tech giant has made a remarkable comeback in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) chips — defying global export controls and intensifying concerns among American tech leaders and policymakers.
As reported by the South China Morning Post, Huawei’s once-stalled chip ambitions have not only rebounded but may now pose a significant challenge to U.S. chipmakers like Nvidia. A new research paper co-authored by Huawei and AI start-up SiliconFlow claims that Huawei’s latest AI chip platform outperformed Nvidia’s in key tasks — a surprising turn for a company that was seen as technologically isolated just a few years ago.
In 2019, Huawei’s then-rotating chairman Eric Xu declared the company’s Ascend 910 chip the “world’s most powerful AI processor.” But just a year later, those ambitions seemed in peril after the U.S. Commerce Department expanded its restrictions, cutting off Huawei from global semiconductor supply chains that rely on American technology.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), then Huawei’s primary chip fabrication partner, stopped doing business with the firm, following the tightened export rules. Analysts at the time, including Paul Trolio of the Eurasia Group, warned that Huawei’s survival as a tech player could be in question.
However, in 2025, Huawei is not only surviving — it’s surging.
In a technical paper unveiled this week, Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 architecture — powered by its Ascend 910C chips — reportedly surpassed Nvidia’s GPU-based SGLang in performance tests involving large language models (LLMs). The system achieved impressive results in both inference and decoding phases, reaching 1,943 tokens per second per neural processing unit (NPU) and maintaining low-latency generation times under 50 milliseconds.
According to industry analyst SemiAnalysis, Huawei’s scale-out computing model, using parallel chip architecture, may be “a generation ahead” of what U.S. giants like Nvidia and AMD currently offer.
This perspective has even been echoed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who recently told reporters at Computex in Taipei: “All in all, the export controls were a failure. The facts would suggest it.” Huang urged U.S. policymakers to reconsider restrictions before rivals like Huawei dominate key markets.
Meanwhile, the People’s Daily published a rare front-page interview with Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, who admitted the company’s chips still lag behind U.S. offerings “by a generation.” Still, Ren emphasized Huawei’s strength lies in system integration and parallel processing, not just in individual chip performance.
“I don’t think about difficulties,” Ren said. “I just move forward one step at a time.”
Despite U.S. attempts to block AI chip exports, Huawei is now expected to ship up to 700,000 Ascend-series chips in 2025, according to estimates by Mizuho Securities — far more than the 200,000 units predicted by U.S. officials. Much of this production is reportedly made possible by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) at the 7-nanometre node, despite yield challenges.
The South China Morning Post highlighted how China’s domestic AI ecosystem is adjusting in real time. Companies like iFlytek and SenseTime have shifted away from U.S.-made chips to embrace Huawei’s Ascend series and other Chinese processors.
Still, domestic suppliers now face the uphill task of meeting future demand from China’s tech titans — including Alibaba (which owns the Post) and Tencent — once their existing inventories of Nvidia chips are exhausted.
Adding to the geopolitical complexity, David Sacks, a former AI and crypto policy lead under the Trump administration, warned that U.S. export rules may have backfired. In a recent Bloomberg interview, Sacks noted that China is now only one to two years behind the U.S. in chip design. He cautioned that U.S. restrictions may have created a market vacuum Huawei is now ready to fill.
“If we’re too restrictive in terms of U.S. sales to the world,” Sacks said, “there will be a time when we kick ourselves and say, ‘All of a sudden Huawei is everywhere.’”
Meanwhile, Huawei’s continued investment in domestic supply chains is evident. Equipment manufacturer SiCarrier, which showcased dozens of new chipmaking tools in March at Semicon China, is rumored to be playing a crucial role in Huawei’s expanded chip production.
At the same time, local software firms like Empyrean Technology are stepping up to fill the void left by U.S. firms barred from exporting electronic design automation (EDA) tools to China — a critical step in developing cutting-edge semiconductors.
As the South China Morning Post notes, the Huawei resurgence reflects China’s broader strategy: reducing dependence on foreign tech while pushing for AI leadership, regardless of U.S. sanctions.
Whether this momentum can be sustained — or whether it will trigger further decoupling in global tech — remains to be seen. But for now, Huawei is once again a force to be reckoned with.
