To prevent China from overtaking them as a superpower in the world of artificial intelligence (AI), the United States has imposed technology restrictions for the past four years. Access to the latest AI chips from NVIDIA and AMD has been blocked, with NVIDIA only allowed to sell chips with reduced power in China. With the trade war between the two countries heating up, Huawei has reportedly launched the CloudMatrix 384 computer system as a competitor to the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system.
Huawei CloudMatrix 384
The CloudMatrix 384 system consists of 384 Huawei Ascend 910c chips, with Huawei saying their system can offer almost twice the processing power, at 300 petaFLOPS compared to 180 petaFLOPS. But at the same time, the CloudMatrix 384 requires 560 kW of power compared to the GB200 NVL72 which requires only 145 kW of power.
This is done by putting five times as many AI chips in the CloudMatrix 384. In comparison, an NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system is equipped with 36 Grace CPUs and 72 Blackwell GPUs. The high energy requirements are not seen as a big issue because China has an energy infrastructure that can handle it and there is no pressure to use more environmentally friendly AI hardware like in the United States.
But with China facing a chip supply that can be blocked at any time by the United States, the CloudMatrix 384 is the best locally made alternative at the moment.
High electricity consumption has forced Microsoft and Meta to start using nuclear power sources to meet their data center needs in the near future. In addition, Google has also been criticized for its data center using a high supply of water for cooling.