A supercomputing facility operated by the city of Shenzhen, southern China’s technology and manufacturing hub, has activated a cluster powered by 10,000 cards running AI chips from Huawei, as China pushes for greater self-sufficiency in semiconductors and artificial intelligence.
The new cluster, activated in late March, is China’s first 10,000-card cluster built with Huawei’s Ascend 910C AI accelerator chips, reported the city’s official newspaper, Shenzhen Special Zone Daily.
The new 11,000-petaflop cluster, along with a 3,000-petaflop cluster activated in 2025, gives the facility a total computing capacity of 14,000 petaflops, the report said.
Competition
Nearly 50 organisations reportedly signed compute framework agreements for the new cluster, while the earlier cluster is fully booked, bringing the combined booking rate for both to 92 percent, in an indication of strong demand for AI computing power.
US-sanctioned Huawei is one of the leaders in developing domestic AI chips to compete with those from market leader Nvidia.
Nvidia’s products have faced patchy availability in China for years due to US sanctions – a fact that has boosted domestic efforts to compete, even though Chinese chipmakers are hampered by lack of access to high-end chip manufacturing equipment.
Next-gen chip
A study by AI start-up DeepSeek found that Huawei’s Ascend 910C operated at roughly 60 percent of the capacity of Nvidia’s H100.
Huawei’s next-generation AI chip, the Ascend 950PR, is expected to deliver faster response speeds and increased compatibility with Nvidia’s CUDA framework, driving orders from Chinese tech giants such as ByteDance and Alibaba Group, Reuters reported.
Huawei is expecting to produce roughly 750,000 units of the Ascend 950PR by the end of this year, after announcing it last September, the Reuters report said.
