Chinese IT giant's CloudMatrix 384 promises GB200 beating perf, if you ignore power and the price tag

Analysis Nvidia has the green light to resume shipments of its H20 GPUs to China, but while the chip may be plentiful, bit barn operators in the region now have far more capable alternatives at their disposal.

Among the most promising is Huawei's CloudMatrix 384 rack systems, which it teased at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai this week.

The system is powered by the Chinese IT goliath's latest Ascend neural processing unit (NPU), the P910C. Assuming you can get your hands on one, the chip promises more than twice the floating point performance of the H20 and more, albeit slower, memory to boot.

However, with its CloudMatrix systems, Huawei is clearly aiming a lot higher than Nvidia's sanctions-compliant silicon. Compared to Nvidia's Blackwell-based GB200 NVL72 rack systems, Huawei's biggest iron boasts about 60 percent higher dense 16-bit floating point performance, roughly twice ...