Seven Chinese AI chip makers are already shipping high-end accelerators
At least seven Chinese companies are already shipping that are being compared with NVIDIA H100 and H200 systems. The Chinese framing splits them into “3 dragons and 4 snakes”: the dragons are large technology companies that build full stacks, while the snakes are newer specialist chip companies that recently went public. Huawei shipped 812,000 AI cards last year, equal to 49% of China’s domestic supply, and is described as having its own and manufacturing base.
The Ascend 950 reportedly targets H200-class . Several of the specialist companies were founded by former chief architects from NVIDIA and AMD. MetaX is presented as a case where former AMD leadership regrouped in Shenzhen, with revenue growing about 3,800 times in three years.
Alibaba is shipping a server with 16 chips of 96GB each, giving one box 1.5TB of . That amount of memory is described as enough to hold a in BF16 format inside a single server.
Key points
- At least seven Chinese companies are described as shipping H100- or H200-class .
- Huawei shipped 812,000 AI cards last year, or 49% of China’s domestic supply.
- The Ascend 950 reportedly aims for H200-class .
- Several newer chip companies were founded by former NVIDIA and AMD leaders.
- Alibaba is shipping a server with 1.5TB of , which could help run very large models locally.