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News · 2026-11-03

Huawei’s Ascend 960DT faces a $32,000 memory bill

@neuronium_ai @neuronium_ai

Huawei is preparing to launch its Ascend 960DT AI chip early next year, saying it will be twice as powerful as its current chips. But the company cannot get enough high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, from Chinese suppliers, while US export controls block direct purchases from Samsung and SK Hynix, which together account for more than 80% of the global market. According to The Information, Huawei is asking customers to source the memory themselves—a workaround that pushes procurement toward a costly, unreliable black market.

Cover: Huawei’s Ascend 960DT faces a $32,000 memory bill

A supply chain built around extraction

Smugglers reportedly bundle HBM with low-cost server processors whose performance falls below the export threshold, then ship the lots to China through Hong Kong. Workshops there separate the memory chips from the processors. The process has a high failure rate, but the profits make it worthwhile.

For buyers, the economics are already punishing:

A Shenzhen broker says the price of smuggled HBM3E rose from a few hundred dollars to about $4,000 per module in a year.
One AI chip needs six to eight modules, putting the memory bill alone at as much as $32,000.
The market also draws on older Nvidia graphics cards dismantled for parts and excess inventory from chip developers that cancelled projects or cut orders.
$4,000HBM3E module
6–8modules per chip
$32,000memory cost

The broader trade points to a growing enforcement problem. By May, South Korea’s customs service had uncovered $560 million in trade violations, more than in all of the previous year. A third of that total involved strategic goods, including chips exported without permission or with false declarations.

The missing number

I think the most revealing detail is not the claimed performance gain, but the gap between that claim and the supply chain needed to make it useful. The announcement offers no estimate of how many Ascend 960DT chips Huawei can deliver with reliable memory, or how much customers will pay once the cost and losses from salvaged HBM are included.

That silence matters because asking customers to find memory does not remove the shortage; it transfers the procurement risk to them. If black-market HBM is both expensive and unreliable, the practical limit on the chip may be set less by its performance than by how many usable memory modules customers can secure.

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