World AI Conference in Shanghai highlights China’s rising semiconductor ambitions amid ongoing U.S. export curbs

SHANGHAI, July 27 — Just weeks after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s widely publicized visit to Beijing, the U.S. chip giant was conspicuously absent from China’s largest artificial intelligence event of the year — the World AI Conference, which kicked off Saturday in Shanghai.

Despite fresh hopes of resuming H20 chip shipments to China, Nvidia opted not to host a booth at the high-profile tech summit. The company declined CNBC’s request for comment on its absence.

In sharp contrast, Huawei — Nvidia’s most prominent Chinese rival — stole the show with a sprawling exhibit featuring its Ascend AI chips, prominently displayed at the venue’s entrance. The telecom and semiconductor powerhouse also unveiled its Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoD, a cutting-edge AI computing system that links 384 Ascend chips to enable large-scale AI model training.

“Huawei is one of the most formidable technology companies in the world,” Huang said earlier this year, cautioning that U.S. export restrictions could accelerate Huawei’s rise as a domestic alternative to Nvidia in China.

💡 Huawei’s Scaling Strategy

While Huawei’s Ascend chips are generally considered less powerful than Nvidia’s latest Blackwell architecture, researchers at SemiAnalysis note that the company’s supercomputing strategy offsets this performance gap by scaling horizontally — using five times more chips per system compared to Nvidia’s GB200. However, this comes at the cost of greater power consumption and reduced efficiency.

🇨🇳 Local Players Fill the Void

Huawei wasn’t alone. Other Chinese firms in the advanced chip supply chain — including Moore Threads and startup Yunsilicon — also had a notable presence at the expo, further underscoring China’s growing self-reliance efforts in semiconductor development amid continued U.S. export controls.

As geopolitical tensions reshape global tech competition, China’s top AI summit reflects a shifting balance of power in the chip world — one where Nvidia’s physical absence speaks volumes, and domestic champions are stepping into the limelight.