China’s Huawei Technologies showed off an AI computing system on Saturday that one industry expert has said rivals Nvidia’s most advanced offering, as the Chinese technology giant seeks to capture market share in the country’s growing artificial intelligence sector.
The CloudMatrix 384 system made its first public debut at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), a three-day event in Shanghai where companies showcase their latest AI innovations, drawing a large crowd to the company’s booth.
The system has drawn close attention from the global AI community since Huawei first announced it in April. Industry analysts view it as a direct competitor to Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72, the U.S. chipmaker’s most advanced system-level product currently available in the market. Dylan Patel, founder of semiconductor research group SemiAnalysis, said in an April article that Huawei now had AI system capabilities that could beat Nvidia.
Huawei staff at its WAIC booth declined to comment when asked to introduce the CloudMatrix 384 system. A spokesperson for Huawei did not respond to questions.
Huawei has become widely regarded as China’s most promising domestic supplier of chips essential for AI development, even though the company faces U.S. export restrictions. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Bloomberg in May that Huawei had been “moving quite fast” and named the CloudMatrix as an example.
The CloudMatrix 384 incorporates 384 of Huawei’s latest 910C chips and outperforms Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 on some metrics, which uses 72 B200 chips, according to SemiAnalysis.
The performance stems from Huawei’s system design capabilities, which compensate for weaker individual chip performance through the use of more chips and system-level innovations, SemiAnalysis said.
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Huawei says the system uses “supernode” architecture that allows the chips to interconnect at super-high speeds and in June, Huawei Cloud CEO Zhang Pingan said the CloudMatrix 384 system was operational on Huawei’s cloud platform.
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