WAIC in Shanghai: China shows off an AI stack built without US chips

China used the World AI Conference in Shanghai, which wrapped up on July 20, to present an AI stack that leans less and less on US technology. The scale set records: more than 1,100 exhibitors, some 3,000 exhibits including over 300 world premieres, spread across 100,000-plus square meters. For the first time, President Xi Jinping delivered the opening keynote himself.

The hardware headline came from Huawei. Its Atlas 950 SuperPoD links 8,192 Ascend 950DT accelerators — built, the company says, without US components — into a single memory pool via the optical UnifiedBus 2.0 fabric. Huawei claims 8 exaflops of FP8 compute, which it says is 6.7 times Nvidia’s NVL144 system, with availability slated for the fourth quarter. China’s AI industry, according to official figures, passed one trillion yuan in output in 2025, roughly $147 billion.

Whether home-grown silicon plus open-weight models is enough to overtake the US remains to be seen. What is certain: a second ecosystem beyond Nvidia is taking shape, with its own tooling and its own dependencies. For self-hosters, that could eventually mean more choice in AI accelerators.