News TSMC halts Ascend 910B shipments to firm suspected acting as a Huawei proxy

[Admin]

Huawei's proxy Sophgo denies its ties with Huawei amid the Ascend 910B backlash.

TSMC halts Ascend 910B shipments to firm suspected acting as a Huawei proxy : Read more

 

[thth]

It is not the Ascend 910B chip. AI cards contains dozens of other types of chips besides the AI Chip. Sophgo sells RISC-V SoCs and micro-controllers. They are commodity items and Huawei can just buy them in the open market.

Ascend cards also have HBM memory chips. Currently there are no HBM manufacturers in China. They are only made by SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron. But Huawei somehow buy them and use in their cards. That doesn't mean those companies violated sanctions.

Even the latest Huawei phones use South Korean RAM chips that were manufactured after sanctions, so Huawei might have bought them in the open market.

Sophgo made a statement that they did not supply anything to Huawei. But people are gonna assume they did any way because they are a Chinese company. However, it is trivial for anyone to acquire those kinds of chips from retailers without the knowledge of the manufacturer. It's really no different from Huawei still buying South Korean memory chips.

 

[Pierce2623]

Well how exactly does a company with no connection to Huawei have all the specs and tech info necessary to produce Huawei’s proprietary AI chip? How stupid would people have to be to believe there’s no connection?

 

[Pierce2623]

It is not the Ascend 910B chip. AI cards contains dozens of other types of chips besides the AI Chip. Sophgo sells RISC-V SoCs and micro-controllers. They are commodity items and Huawei can just buy them in the open market.

Ascend cards also have HBM memory chips. Currently there are no HBM manufacturers in China. They are only made by SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron. But Huawei somehow buy them and use in their cards. That doesn't mean those companies violated sanctions.

Even the latest Huawei phones use South Korean RAM chips that were manufactured after sanctions, so Huawei might have bought them in the open market.

Sophgo made a statement that they did not supply anything to Huawei. But people are gonna assume they did any way because they are a Chinese company. However, it is trivial for anyone to acquire those kinds of chips from retailers without the knowledge of the manufacturer. It's really no different from Huawei still buying South Korean memory chips.

No people assume there’s a connection to Huawei because they’re ordering a Huawei proprietary AI chip from TSMC that only Huawei can legally sell. Even in China they can’t just gegHuawei’s newest proprietary AI chip produced and sell it as a Sophgo without Huawei’s involvement.

 

[thth]

No people assume there’s a connection to Huawei because they’re ordering a Huawei proprietary AI chip from TSMC that only Huawei can legally sell. Even in China they can’t just gegHuawei’s newest proprietary AI chip produced and sell it as a Sophgo without Huawei’s involvement.

From the original report it was reported it is an auxiliary chip rather than the main compute chip. It would be hard to trick TSMC into manufacturing the main Chip, because TSMC used to manufacture that chip for Huawei before 2021. If some other company came with that design TSMC would spot that in a second. In fact TSMC told FT that it did happen some time ago. Some other company came with 910B design and TSMC turned them down and informed US authorities.

Then there was another unrelated news of a TSMC chip on 910B card (not the main chip), which is now being identified as a Sophgo chip. I am guessing this is just one of the products Sophgo sells out in the open rather than a custom chip for Huawei. Bitmain's main customer's are in the West, so I can't believe they would risk supplying something to Huawei. But anything is possible of course.

These are two different things which has now been mixed up by some newspapers.