Huawei is rumored to have purchased TSMC's Ascend 910 AI chip through a shell company, and TSMC has launched an internal investigation.

Although Huawei ( cannot legally obtain advanced chips produced by TSMC, it is reported that last year, through a shell company, Huawei obtained TSMC's Ascend 910 AI chiplets )Chiplet(. The news came from TechInsights and TSMC, and it is currently unclear the specific number of chiplets Huawei has obtained. However, according to a report from CSIS )Center For Strategic & International Studies), Huawei has acquired as many as 2 million Ascend 910 B AI chiplets. These TSMC-produced chips are enough to manufacture 1 million Ascend 910C chips, violating U.S. chip export controls. TSMC may have unknowingly helped Huawei's shell company produce chips, and TSMC has initiated an internal investigation.

Ascend 910B and Ascend 910C

Huawei's Ascend 910 chip was launched in 2019, consisting of Virtuvian AI chip, Nimbus V3 I/O chip, four HBM2E memory stacks, and two virtual chips. TSMC produced Virtuvian chips for Huawei from 2019 to September 2020, using its N7+ process technology, which features a 7nm node with EUV layer.

In 2020, after the US government included Huawei on the Entity List, Huawei had to redesign its Virtuvian chip and shift production to SMIC. SMIC adopted N+1 technology (first generation 7nm process) for manufacturing. The new Virtuvian chip's GPU is called HiSilicon Ascend 910B.

Later, Huawei developed a more complex version of the Virtuvian chip for Ascend 910C, manufactured by SMIC using second-generation 7nm technology (N+2(. Ascend 910C has only one computing chip, and TSMC produced the original Ascend 910 chip for Huawei between 2023 and 2024.

Production of Huawei Ascend 910B and Ascend 910C is not high, so most components are disabled for some computing elements when they leave the factory. In addition, only 75% of Huawei's AI chips can pass through advanced packaging. If there is an error in the advanced packaging process of combining two Ascend 910B chips and HBM into a unified Ascend 910C chip, it may also damage the complete chip. Industry insiders revealed to CSIS that currently about 75% of Ascend 910C chips pass through advanced packaging processes.

Huawei continues to purchase millions of Ascend 910B and Ascend 910C for its internal AI projects and external customers. DeepSeek claims that the performance of Ascend 910C is only 60% of Nvidia H100, which may not be sufficient for training large language models, but is already sufficient for inference workloads.

The core is a small chip that can be assembled. Having a core can also assemble high-end chips, using empty shell registered companies to purchase cores and become a loophole controlled by the United States. TSMC, which is involved in the suspicion of illegally exporting chips to China, may reduce Trump's concerns with the relocation of production lines, but it cannot reduce the risks of shell companies that will emerge in the future through third-party purchases of assembled core chips.

This article reports that Huawei has bought TSMC's Ascend 910 AI chip through a shell company. TSMC has initiated an internal investigation. First appeared in ChainNews ABMedia.