Huawei, Alibaba Unveil New AI Chips as Xi Opens First U.S. Visit in 11 Years

3 articles · Updated · CNBC · Sep 24

Huawei moved up shipment of its Ascent 960DT AI chip by three quarters to Q1 2027, while Alibaba launched the Zhenwu V900, which it says triples its prior chip’s performance.
Days before Xi Jinping’s summit with Donald Trump, the releases bolster Beijing’s argument that U.S. export controls can slow Chinese AI progress but cannot choke it off.
Huawei and other Chinese firms are still compensating for weaker chips by linking thousands into clusters, yet analysts say each Huawei chip delivers about half Nvidia’s compute and supply remains tight.
U.S. firms still lead on benchmarks and business scale, with American model makers generating 50 to 100 times the revenue of comparable Chinese companies, according to Chip War author Chris Miller.
Chip curbs are not on the summit agenda despite the timing: U.S. and Chinese officials instead set up an AI incident-warning channel, while Xi is expected to focus more on Taiwan and Iran.