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Global Restrictions Keep Huawei’s AI Chips Behind the Frontier—but Not Frozen

Export restrictions and reported memory bottlenecks constrain Huawei’s AI-chip scale, while conflicting production estimates and incomplete benchmark details complicate claims that its technology is frozen.
From TheFinanceBase Team4 min to read
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U.S. restrictions have limited Huawei’s access to advanced chipmaking technology and supply chains, constraining the scale at which it can produce AI chips and helping preserve a gap with Nvidia’s leading systems. But the evidence does not show that Huawei’s chip engineering has stopped advancing. Production estimates conflict, and published performance comparisons lack enough detail to establish a universal benchmark.

What the U.S. restrictions did—and did not do

Two separate actions in May 2025

On May 13, 2025, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced that it would rescind the Biden-era AI Diffusion Rule, whose compliance requirements were due to take effect May 15. BIS separately issued guidance about advanced computing chips from China, including Huawei’s Ascend chips. Rescinding the diffusion rule was not the same as removing controls related to Huawei. BIS said it planned to formalize the rescission and issue a replacement rule later.

The Associated Press reported that BIS’s guidance treated Ascend semiconductors as subject to U.S. export controls because the agency believed they used U.S. technology. BIS warned that using them could risk violating U.S. export controls and lead to enforcement action. That is the agency’s stated position; it should not be read as a court-tested conclusion covering every use or transaction.

A later licensing policy addressed different chips

On January 13, 2026, BIS announced case-by-case review of applications to export Nvidia H200, AMD MI325X and similar chips to China, subject to conditions involving supply, purchaser compliance and testing by a U.S. third party. Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler described the policy this way: “Export controls should evolve with changes in technology, while protecting national security. Permitting the sale of the H200 to China under controlled conditions will strengthen the American technology ecosystem.” This policy concerned applications for those U.S. chips; it did not, by itself, change the treatment of Huawei’s Ascend chips.

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How many Ascend chips might Huawei produce?

There is no settled production count in the available figures. A 2025 report by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party describes estimates with different sources and assumptions, ranging from 200,000 to 800,000 chips or equivalents for 2025. They should be treated as estimates, not audited totals.

Figure What it represents Qualification
No more than 200,000 Huawei Ascend AI chips manufactured in 2025 The House Select Committee report attributes this estimate to the U.S. government; it is not a confirmed production count.
250,000 Equivalent Ascend 910Cs in 2025 Press reporting cited by the House Select Committee report; not an audited total.
As many as 800,000 Ascend 910Cs in 2025 An analysis cited by the House Select Committee report, based on a possible high-bandwidth-memory stockpile.
Around 300,000 Ascend 910Cs in 2026 The same analysis’s conditional projection if high-bandwidth-memory production remained a bottleneck—not a confirmed output figure.

The report’s range matters: it would be misleading to present one of these estimates as Huawei’s verified annual output. The 2026 figure is especially conditional, since it depends on future memory supply.

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What the reported performance gap means

The House Select Committee report characterizes Nvidia’s Blackwell products as substantially faster than Huawei’s Ascend 910C. Its comparisons are:

Product in the report Reported comparison with Ascend 910C How to interpret it
Nvidia B100 Roughly 2× the performance Committee report comparison; the surfaced information does not establish a universal workload or benchmark.
Nvidia GB200 Roughly 3× the performance Committee report comparison; system configuration and measurement conditions are not sufficiently specified for a general ratio.
Nvidia GB300 Roughly 4× the performance Committee report comparison; do not treat as a like-for-like result across all uses.

These ratios are not a substitute for controlled, workload-specific testing. The cited material does not provide a benchmark dataset that establishes parity or a fixed performance multiple across training, inference and different system configurations. Nor does it establish an audited Huawei production disclosure or demonstrate that engineering progress has ceased.

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Why chip counts and headline ratios are not the whole story

Restrictions can matter even when they do not halt design work: limited access to advanced manufacturing inputs and supply chains can constrain how many accelerators are made and deployed. High-bandwidth memory (HBM) is one reported bottleneck in the production estimates. For a buyer, policymaker or investor assessing the practical significance, available volume and the ability to combine chips into usable systems matter alongside a chip’s nominal speed.

A meaningful comparison between AI accelerators needs to specify the conditions being compared:

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The committee report’s performance ratios do not specify enough of these conditions to resolve a like-for-like comparison. They are useful as a report-level indication of a claimed gap, not as a universal measure of real-world performance.

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Is Huawei’s AI-chip technology literally stuck in the past?

No. “In the past” is a forceful way to describe the pressure restrictions and bottlenecks can put on manufacturing scale and competitiveness, but the figures do not prove that Huawei’s technology has stopped advancing. They show contested production estimates, a reported memory constraint and a committee-level comparison with Nvidia products whose benchmark conditions are not fully established. Any present-day conclusion about export rules also needs to account for policy changes after the dated actions described above.

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