Huawei's new Ascend 910C AI GPUs have major issues: overheating, chips stop functioning

Huawei's new Ascend AI chips are reportedly experiencing major issues, so bad that big Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, Tencent, and TikTok parent company ByteDance are no longer adopting Huawei's new AI accelerators at scale.

In a new report from The Information, the new Huawei Ascend AI chips are experiencing overheating issues as well as risks associated with US sanctions, forcing the AI chips that are mainly sold to state-owned enterprises and local governments in China.

The report says that the ecosystem and technical issues surrounding Huawei's Ascend AI chips are causing major headaches, as companies are having to switch from CUDA at a "high cost".

Chinese tech companies have been deploying their systems based on NVIDIA's dominant CUDA software ecosystem for many, many years now, so migrating to Huawei hardware means companies have to redesign data center infrastructure, rewrite their software, and rebuild their engineering workflows, which is a transition that is both very expensive and very complex.

The problems arise from Huawei's Ascend AI chips are reportedly overheating and "can stop functioning" which... well... that ain't good at all. The Information adds that given AI development is a race against time, the opportunity cost involved makes Huawei's family of Ascend AI accelerators less attractive.

The Information reports that executives at Chinese tech companies have reportedly told Huawei during meetings that "it is not our job to adopt to Huawei's platform -- Huawei should adapt to ours".