Reuters-Yonhap The TechInsights finding has largely gone unreported in official Chinese media, although several social media accounts translated and cited foreign media reports. As Huawei's Ascend chips have risen to become China's premier AI-focused semiconductors, they are now at the heart of the country's self-sufficiency drive. As of this year, the Ascend ecosystem has 40 hardware partners, 1,600 software partners and 2,900 AI application solutions, according to Huawei. Huawei first released the Ascend 910 chip in 2019, four months after the company was added to a U.S. trade blacklist, and it has since kept its capabilities close to its chest. The company never officially released the 910B. Instead, the product just appeared unannounced on the mainland in 2023, quickly becoming the most popular alternative to Nvidia products. A Huawei executive said at a forum in June this year that the 910B chip is on par with Nvidia's A100 -- one of the most popular graphics processing units in the AI industry.