NVIDIA CEO says Huawei's new CloudMatrix AI cluster competes with Grace Blackwell AI servers

NVIDIA has said that Huawei's new AI developments are far more capable than people though, so much so that they're more powerful than what NVIDIA is allowed to get into China, effectively forcing them out of the market.

Considering NVIDIA kick-started the AI revolution without competition from anyone (including AMD and Intel) but over the last few years multiple competitors have entered the ring, and one of them is from China: Huawei. Huawei has been hard at work developing new AI hardware to compete with NVIDIA, which has been facing ever-increasing US export regulations that have stopped the company from pumping China full of its AI chips.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said: "Huawei's technology, based on our best understanding at the moment, is probably comparable to an H200. They've been moving quite fast. They've also offered this new system called Cloud Matrix, which scales up to even a larger system than our latest generation, Grace Blackwell. Huawei, as you know, is a formidable technology company. And they're not sitting still. They look for ways to compete, and they're quite formidable".

The thing is, until now... Jensen and NVIDIA never mentioned the performance of Huawei products, other than the Chinese company is a "formidable rival" showing how much Huawei has caught up in the last 12-24 months. Having the NVIDIA CEO himself mention Huawei's new CloudMatrix AI cluster on public media is a big deal, especially when saying the Chinese company is pushing out the performance of its Grace Blackwell AI systems.

Jensen also said that Huawei's new Ascend 910C AI chip competes against NVIDIA's previous-gen H200 AI GPU, which is the highest-end Hopper chip made. Prior to this news, the last we heard was that China hadn't matched the performance of the H100, yet Jensen himself says otherwise.