Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – The Joe Biden administration’s new rules to tighten and expand restrictions on AI chip exports to China could open up huge opportunities for Huawei. According to analysts, Huawei could take the market that has been ‘held’ by Nvidia in China.

So far, Nvidia is the largest supplier of AI chips in China with a market share of 90%. The US government’s new rules will make it difficult for Nvidia to sell its products in the country led by Xi Jinping.

For this reason, several original Chinese firms, including Huawei, have prepared themselves to seize Nvidia’s ‘throne’. They started developing local versions of chips made by Nvidia, namely the A100 and H100 GPUs.

According to analysts and several AI firms in China such as iFlyTek, Huawei’s AI chip, called Ascend, can already compete with Nvidia’s in terms of computing power. However, the performance is still not at the same level.

“China’s move, in my opinion, will actually bring benefits to Huawei,” said Chief Market Analyst at Guotai Junan Securities, Jiang Yifan, on his personal Weibo account.

Nevertheless, there are challenges that Chinese firms still need to overcome. So far, the AI ​​chips they have developed still use the software ecosystem from Nvidia.

According to former chip design executive who is now a consultant, Woz Ahmed, Huawei must imitate the ecosystem built by Nvidia in order to replace the manufacturer’s position in China.

However, Huawei also has to be careful because the US giant generally holds key patents, making it difficult for other manufacturers to copy it.

Huawei and Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests to respond to this matter.

[Gambas:Video CNBC]

(fab/fab)