Chinese AI chipmakers are jacking up accelerator prices as scarce high-bandwidth memory turns Beijing’s Nvidia replacement drive into an expensive headache.
According to Reuters, Huawei has lifted the indicated price of its Ascend 950DT accelerator card to more than 250,000 yuan (€32,000), according to people familiar with the pricing. That is 20-50 per cent more than customers were quoted just two months ago, depending on contract terms.
Huawei has said its most advanced AI chip will become available in the fourth quarter of 2026. Cambricon has raised the indicated price of its next-generation accelerator, tentatively called the 690, by between 20 and 30 per cent. Smaller Chinese rivals MetaX and Iluvatar CoreX have made similar increases.
The culprit is high-bandwidth memory, which has become another unpleasant bottleneck in China’s attempt to build home-grown substitutes for restricted Nvidia hardware.
HBM stacks memory chips vertically, giving AI processors the bandwidth needed to shovel huge amounts of data around quickly. The advanced market is dominated by SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology.
Washington tightened export controls on certain advanced HBM products to China in December 2024. Chinese chipmakers have increasingly resorted to grey-market suppliers, where the same memory can cost several times what buyers elsewhere pay.
Memory represents a sizeable part of an AI accelerator’s manufacturing cost, so those inflated prices are feeding directly into finished hardware. Huawei has said its Ascend 950 series will use two proprietary HBM technologies. The 950PR uses HiBL 1.0, while the 950DT gets HiZQ 2.0. The company has not explained where or how it manufactures that memory.
The Ascend 950DT is aimed primarily at developing AI models and generating responses. The 950PR handles user requests before passing them to a model.
Older Huawei hardware is getting more expensive too. The Ascend 950PR sold for about 60,000 yuan (€7,700) a card at the start of the year but now costs more than 80,000 yuan (€10,200), up roughly 30 per cent. The older Ascend 910C board has climbed from about 90,000 yuan (€11,500) at the start of the year to more than 110,000 yuan (€14,100).
The increases are making Chinese AI infrastructure more expensive just as local suppliers have been handed an opportunity by US restrictions on Nvidia’s most advanced processors.
China’s AI chip market is worth about $50 billion, making that opportunity large enough for local semiconductor outfits to tolerate plenty of memory-induced misery. Supply constraints are forcing chipmakers to shuffle their available hardware. Iluvatar CoreX has doubled planned GPU shipments to TikTok owner ByteDance to 100,000 units this year. It has even diverted GPUs intended for its own use to meet ByteDance’s requirements.
Cambricon has yet to formally launch the 690, with the 590 remaining its current flagship. Huawei is ByteDance’s largest domestic AI chip supplier, followed by Cambricon and Iluvatar CoreX.
