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Huawei cannot buy enough high-bandwidth memory from Samsung or SK hynix, so it has told some customers for its next flagship AI chip, the , to source the memory themselves, The Information reported on Monday.
Fujian Jinhua, the sanctioned Chinese memory maker that has supplied Huawei for years, trails the Koreans and lacks the capacity.
Much of the gap is filled by smuggling: HBM is mounted beside cheap, low-performance server processors, which export rules judge by the processor's speed, and then heated off the boards in Chinese workshops. A broker quoted about $4,000 per HBM3E stack, and an AI chip needs six to eight.
The 960DT, due in the first quarter of 2027, is meant to double the memory bandwidth and capacity of Huawei's current part, and Huawei is tuning it with DeepSeek for , which DeepSeek has so far done only on Nvidia hardware. Huawei has also raised the suggested price of its current Ascend 950DT above 250,000 yuan, about $37,000, according to TrendForce's summary.
Huawei tells some chip customers to find their own high-bandwidth memory
Huawei cannot buy enough high-bandwidth memory from Samsung or SK hynix, so it has told some customers for its next flagship AI chip, the Ascend 960DT, to source the memory themselves, The Information reported on Monday. Fujian Jinhua, the sanctioned Chinese memory maker that has supplied Huawei for years, trails the Koreans and lacks the capacity. Much of the gap is filled by smuggling: HBM is mounted beside cheap, low-performance server processors, which export rules judge by the processor's speed, and then heated off the boards in Chinese workshops. A broker quoted about $4,000 per HBM3E stack, and an AI chip needs six to eight.
The 960DT, due in the first quarter of 2027, is meant to double the memory bandwidth and capacity of Huawei's current part, and Huawei is tuning it with DeepSeek for pre-training, which DeepSeek has so far done only on Nvidia hardware. Huawei has also raised the suggested price of its current Ascend 950DT above 250,000 yuan, about $37,000, according to TrendForce's summary. SourcesBC
Sources
- BSmugglers get expensive memory chips to China from South Korea (The Information, paywalled, not opened)theinformation.com
- CChina reportedly obtains smuggled HBM via server packages; Huawei 960DT faces domestic HBM shortage (TrendForce)trendforce.com
This story ran in the Morning Brief of November 3rd 2026.