Is the US afraid of Huawei? Reports point to the Ascend 910C accelerator’s performance to explain the surprising reversal of Nvidia's H200 AI GPU ban on China
H200 export allows continued US influence over Chinese AI software ecosystems
· TechRadarNews By Efosa Udinmwen published 12 December 2025
(Image credit: Communications Today)
- The White House allows Nvidia H200 exports to China with a 25% fee
- US officials evaluated strategies ranging from full export bans to market flooding
- President Trump says H200 exports support American jobs and manufacturing efforts
The White House has authorized the export of Nvidia H200 AI accelerators to China, attaching a 25% fee per shipment.
According to reports, the decision was influenced by Huawei’s rapid development of its Ascend 910C chips, particularly the CloudMatrix 384 system, which integrates 384 of these accelerators.
Internal sources suggest that the US move aims to maintain American dominance in the global tech ecosystem while keeping the country’s proprietary Blackwell and Rubin architectures restricted.
Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 performance
Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 has been described as a “nuclear-level product” capable of delivering 300 petaflops of dense BF16 compute.
It surpasses Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 system on certain performance metrics, highlighting its raw computational power.
The system also provides 3.6 times more aggregate memory and over twice the memory bandwidth compared to Nvidia’s platform.
However, these gains come at the cost of nearly four times the power consumption, raising efficiency concerns.
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