Editor's take: The Trump administration attempted to curb China's ability to advance its computing capabilities through tariffs and other trade restrictions. However, this unprecedented trade war may have instead pushed Beijing to accelerate its efforts in developing powerful new AI systems.
As newly appointed US tech czar David Sacks predicted just a month ago, Trump's tariffs appear to be backfiring in spectacular fashion. Chinese tech giant Huawei is reportedly developing a powerful AI system that can already compete with Nvidia's most advanced infrastructure in the race for the world's fastest AI platforms.
Huawei publicly unveiled its new system, the CloudMatrix 384, at the recent World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. The three-day event was packed with companies showcasing their latest AI innovations, and according to Reuters, Huawei's booth was among the most crowded and talked-about at the show.
Many attendees were eager to learn more about the CloudMatrix 384, but Huawei officials declined to provide further details. While the system may have been on display primarily to generate buzz, enough information has emerged to give us a clearer sense of where Huawei – and China's broader AI industry – might be heading.
According to a recent study by SemiAnalysis, Huawei's CloudMatrix 384 is the company's answer to Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 – a flagship AI supersystem designed to run trillion-parameter models in real time. Nvidia's solution includes 36 Grace CPUs and 72 Blackwell GPUs, working together in a unified rack to function as a single massive GPU that dramatically accelerates large language model inference.
While Huawei lags behind Nvidia and other Western firms in advanced silicon design, its engineers chose to compensate with scale and innovation rather than raw speed. The CloudMatrix 384 incorporates 384 Ascend 910C chips, interconnected in an all-to-all topology to maximize performance. The Ascend 910C, designed by Huawei's own fabless semiconductor arm HiSilicon, effectively combines two Ascend 910B processors to deliver performance on par with Nvidia's H100 GPU.
A fully configured CloudMatrix 384 can reach 300 petaFLOPs of dense BF16 compute, nearly double the compute capacity of Nvidia's GB200 NVL72. It also boasts 3.6× greater total memory capacity and 2.1× more memory bandwidth.
SemiAnalysis noted in April that with further yield improvements, Huawei may soon outpace Nvidia – and by extension, the United States – in the AI race. The major caveat? Power consumption. The CloudMatrix 384 requires more than four times the energy needed to run a GB200 NVL72 at full capacity.
However, unlike many Western countries, China has been aggressively expanding its power generation infrastructure using coal, solar, hydro, wind, and other sources.