Nvidia identifies Huawei as top competitor for the first time: What this means

Nvidia said that China's Huawei competes in supplying chips designed for artificial intelligence.

Nvidia identified Huawei as a top competitor in several categories, including artificial intelligence chips, for the first time in a filing with the Securities and Exchange commission late Wednesday.

A smartphone with a displayed NVIDIA logo is placed on a computer motherboard.(Reuters)

The Santa Clara, California-based company said that China's Huawei competes in supplying chips designed for artificial intelligence such as graphics processing units (GPUs), central processing units (CPUs) and networking chips. The company also identified Huawei as a cloud service company designing its own hardware and software to improve AI computing.

Nvidia declined to comment on Thursday.

Huawei developed the Ascend series of chips as a rival to Nvidia's line of AI chips. The Chinese company's main product, the 910B chip, is its main rival to Nvidia's A100 chip, which launched roughly three years ago.

Analysts have estimated China's AI chip market to be worth $7 billion.

Last year, Reuters reported that Chinese search giant Baidu placed a chip order with Huawei ahead of widely anticipated new rules by the U.S. government tightened restrictions on advanced AI chips exported to China.

Other rivals pointed out by Nvidia include Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom and Qualcomm. The chip company also identified several large cloud computing companies such as Amazon.com and Microsoft

Nvidia shares surged 14% in early afternoon trading on Thursday after the company issued a revenue forecast that topped consensus estimates as strong demand for AI continues.

(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Marguerita Choy)