Hei, where did you learn that trick Faraday?
discussion.fool.com
Huawei’s HBM Access
Leading edge foreign reliance is part of the equation here, but China is even more reliant on HBM. China is not able to manufacture this reliably with CXMT still a year away from ramping any reasonable volume. Luckily Samsung has come to the rescue, having been the number one supplier of HBM to China through which Huawei has been able to stockpile a total of 13 million HBM stacks which can be used for 1.6 million Ascend 910C packages before any HBM bans.
Furthermore, this banned HBM is still being re-exported to China. The HBM export ban is specifically for raw HBM packages. Chips with HBM can still be shipped as long as they don’t exceed the FLOPS regulations. CoAsia Electronics is the sole distributor of HBM for Samsung in Greater China and they have been shipping HBM2E that is to ASIC design service company Faraday who gets SPIL to “package” it alongside of a cheap 16nm logic die.
Faraday then ships this system in package to China, which is technically allowed, but Chinese companies can then recover the HBM by desoldering. We think they employ techniques to make it very easy for the HBM to be extracted from the package, like using very weak low-temperature solder bumps, so when we say it is “packaged,” we mean this in the loosest way possible.
SemiAnalysis - New article on China's Huawei's AI Chip Development
It’s worth the entire read, even though it gets quite detailed. A few takeaways: • Huawei is a generation behind in chips, but its scale-up solution is arguably a generation ahead of Nvidia and AMD’s current products on the market. • Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 competes directly with Nvidia’s...
discussion.fool.com
Leading edge foreign reliance is part of the equation here, but China is even more reliant on HBM. China is not able to manufacture this reliably with CXMT still a year away from ramping any reasonable volume. Luckily Samsung has come to the rescue, having been the number one supplier of HBM to China through which Huawei has been able to stockpile a total of 13 million HBM stacks which can be used for 1.6 million Ascend 910C packages before any HBM bans.
Furthermore, this banned HBM is still being re-exported to China. The HBM export ban is specifically for raw HBM packages. Chips with HBM can still be shipped as long as they don’t exceed the FLOPS regulations. CoAsia Electronics is the sole distributor of HBM for Samsung in Greater China and they have been shipping HBM2E that is to ASIC design service company Faraday who gets SPIL to “package” it alongside of a cheap 16nm logic die.
Faraday then ships this system in package to China, which is technically allowed, but Chinese companies can then recover the HBM by desoldering. We think they employ techniques to make it very easy for the HBM to be extracted from the package, like using very weak low-temperature solder bumps, so when we say it is “packaged,” we mean this in the loosest way possible.