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The battle for the AI stack: Nvidia versus Huawei, with Europe watching from the sidelines
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Fusion42 · 22 July 2026 · Fusion42 review
The US-China AI competition now extends across the full stack—chips and software—with Nvidia and Huawei as the two contenders. Huawei's open-sourced CANN toolkit and torch_npu plugin are directly challenging Nvidia's CUDA lock-in, whilst Europe remains a component supplier without a competing accelerator or software ecosystem.
This Wire brief sits within Fusion42's coverage of AI Infrastructure and Semiconductors.
◆ ◆ The Wire takeaway
If you're building AI infrastructure or tools outside the US, CUDA's ten-year moat just cracked: Huawei's torch_npu plugin lets PyTorch run on Ascend chips without rewriting code, and DeepSeek proved the models work on both stacks. Your switching cost—the thing that kept you locked in—is gone.
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1 source · 22 Jul 2026
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