the biggest bet in its history to national chip manufacturers

China has defined a series of steps to become the first world power. Technological sovereignty falls within this roadmap and, to achieve the objective, a greater investment in local technology is necessary. The current battlefield is that of AI chips, a segment that Nvidia dominates with an iron fist, but if there is a way to change the trend it is with technology and money, a lot of money.

And China has found its three winning horses.

In short. China is a giant market for Nvidia. With Western Big Tech in his pocket (although Anthropic and Meta are looking favorably at Samsung for inference chips for the age of agentic AI), Nvidia was missing the other big pie. China is a market valued in 50,000 million dollars for whoever manages to position itself as a leader in the AI ​​chip segment, but the problem for Nvidia is that it is not easy at all.

Due to bureaucratic problems on the part of the US and China itself, Nvidia is a bit in no man’s land. Meanwhile, national companies have been positioning themselves, presenting their alternatives and GPUs for training this technology. And with the order to bet on the national product, Chinese companies are clear about it. As we read in Business TimesChinese Big Tech currently invests 30% annually of its budget in national AI accelerators, but that spending will increase to 46% over the next twelve months.

The horses. Some of these Big Techs are creating their own chips, or already have them. This is the case of Alibaba or Tencent, which would be a kind of Meta or Google: they offer a product to the user, to other companies and, in addition, they have their own data centers with their home-made chips. However, there are other companies that are more focused on creating the hardware to power the internal data centers of those other large companies.

This is the case of Hygon Information Technology or Cambricon Technologies, but also of Huawei. All three offer AI platforms that are becoming increasingly important in a context in which Nvidia H20 chips designed specifically for China They are increasingly difficult to find due to that national order to prioritize homemade hardware.

The advantage of these companies is that it is no longer about raw power, which is one of the advantages that Nvidia had (although Nvidia is much more, since it also has a complete software suite and so on), but about speed and low latency. For agentic AI, high bandwidth for fast data transfer is essential, and that seems to be a point that Chinese hardware companies are focusing on.

The Ascend. The interesting thing is that this strategy is not a future plan and is already being put into practice. Zhipu AI, for example, is a company that has already trained its GLM-5 model on more than 740 billion parameters entirely with the Huawei Ascend 910C. In addition, the Chinese company is working on the development of the Ascend 950 and 960 chips that promise to achieve parity with Nvidia’s most modern architectures.

And the supernodes. On the other hand, Huawei continues to push the Atlas 950 supernode. Presented a few months ago, it is a cluster of up to 9,192 Ascend 950DT NPUs per system with up to 1,152 TB of unified memory. It is, according to the company, a direct competitor to Nvidia’s NVL144 rack, achieving 6.7 times more computing power than that of the American company.

It is designed for both training and inference and, although it raises doubts about the energy efficiency per computing unit compared to that of Nvidia, what is clear is that it is a product that Chinese Big Tech They will be able to ‘shoot’ for their future models. Huawei is taking the platform around the world and its next appointment is at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2026 in Shanghai. Whether Nvidia solutions are used or not, what is clear is that the intention is to prioritize national hardware.

China is going to invest nearly $300 billion to build data centers over the next five years to boost AI across all sectors of society. For its part, at least 80% of the basic technologywhere the chips come in, will be supplied by national companies. As several have already pointed out (Jensen Huang among them), the US veto of China It was the worst move they could make. because they only achieved one thing: give wings to their accelerated technological development.

In Xataka | Huawei is very close to a great technological milestone. And he is very clear about what has allowed him to do so: the US veto