China sanctions are opening the door for Huawei to define the new global standards

For Nvidia losing the Chinese market would be “a huge loss.” We do not say it; Jensen Huang assures itthe general director of this American company. The future of this company in China is objectively uncertain. US sanctions They do not stop hardeningand little by little they are cutting the range of products that Nvidia can deliver to their Chinese customers despite the attempts of the latter To get out of prohibitions.

There is a lot of money at stake. During the last fiscal year, which expired on January 26, 2025, China represented approximately 13% of NVIDIA’s total income with a figure of about 17,000 million dollars. In practice, the country led by Xi Jinping is the third best client of this company only behind the US and Taiwan. However, there is only money at stake; On the table there is also the possibility that Huawei manages to define global standards to the detriment of Nvidia technologies.

CUDA domain is in danger

“We are at a turning point. The United States must decide whether it will continue leading the development and global implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) or if it is going to go back and retreat (…) America cannot lead to slow down. If we go back others will occupy the space. And the global ecosystem of the AI ​​will fragment technologically, economically and ideologically, has declared Jensen Huang before US legislators.

For Nvidia it is a problem not being able to sell its GPUs to its Chinese clients, but it is an even greater problem that CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) end up losing your current domain In the AI ​​industry. And this technology has an essential role in the Nvidia business. Most artificial intelligence projects that are currently being developed are implemented on CUDA.

This technology brings together the compiler and development tools used by programmers to develop their software for NVIDIA GPUs, and replace it with another option in the projects that are already underway it is a problem. Huawei, who aspires to an important portion From this market in China, it has Cann (Compute Architecture for Neural Networks), which is its alternative to CUDA, but for the moment the latter dominates the market.

Cann has received criticism because, apparently, it is to use it, and also because its performance is unstable, documentation is insufficient and has reliability problems. However, underestimate Huawei’s ability When correcting these shortcomings it would be a serious mistake. In fact, this Chinese company has admitted the existence of these problems And he has confirmed that he is working to solve them. However, not only Huawei threatens Nvidia’s leadership position.

Cann is not the only country’s asset governed by Xi Jinping. Moore Threads It is one of the Chinese companies that are dedicated to the production of hardware for which companies aligned with the interests of the US and its allies cannot sell software or advanced equipment. Although it is very young (it was founded in 2020) it has something very important in its favor: its founder is Zhang Jianzhong, former general manager of the Nvidia subsidiary in China, so it is evident that he knows well what he has in hand.

Moore Threads has developed several GPU for AI applications that, on paper, rival some of the advanced solutions that have placed in the Nvidia, AMD or Huawei market. However, this company has something else: a software package with which it pursues Finally break the domain of CUDA. He calls it MUSEis compatible with the range of MTT cards and incorporates a compiler, execution libraries, specialized libraries and code purification tools. On paper its most attractive capacity for China is that it allows to reuse the code written in CUDA, transferring it so that it can be executed on the cards for Moore Threads.

Image | Nvidia | Huawei

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