Chinese AI chip designers are marking up their accelerators as the global high-bandwidth memory shortage feeds into production costs.
Huawei has lifted the indicated price of its Ascend 950DT past 250,000 yuan ($37,255), according to Reuters. Customers quoted two months ago face increases of 20 to 50 percent depending on contract terms. Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the discussions, put the rise closer to 60 percent over three months, with the figure set in line with NVIDIA’s B200.
Cambricon has repriced its next-generation 690 chip 20 to 30 percent above levels indicated two months ago. Smaller rivals MetaX and Iluvatar CoreX have pushed through similar increases.
The trigger is memory. HBM is the costliest component in an AI accelerator, and supply is controlled by SK hynix, Samsung and Micron. Huawei’s salespeople have warned buyers that HBM supply is particularly constrained and pushing prices higher.
Huawei has said the 950DT, its most advanced AI processor, reaches customers in the fourth quarter. The pricing move shows how the memory crunch is complicating Beijing’s effort to substitute domestic silicon for NVIDIA products, because the replacement chips get more expensive just as buyers are asked to switch.
It also changes the economics of China’s largest planned AI clusters, where accelerator counts run into the tens of thousands. For designers outside the memory business, the shortage has become a margin problem as much as a supply problem.
