China seeks a homegrown alternative to Nvidia — these are some of the companies to watch

U.S. sanctions over the years on China's semiconductor industry has forced Beijing to ramp up efforts to boost its domestic chip sector.

The boom of artificial intelligence and foundational models has only spurred on China's goal of playing a leading role in the chip industry.

So far, it is American firm Nvidia with its graphics processing units, or GPUs, that has garnered the headlines, as it designs the key piece of hardware required to train up huge AI models, such as the likes seen from OpenAI that underpins ChatGPT.

While Nvidia can ship certain chips to China, Washington has shown its willingness to cut its tech rival off from the most cutting-edge semiconductors and tools needed to make them. This has renewed focus on China's homegrown efforts to rival Nvidia and create semiconductors that can underpin the world's second-largest economy's own AI industry.

CNBC spoke to two analysts who identified some of the leading Chinese competitors to Nvidia.

Huawei is one of China's tech champions with a business that spans telecommunications infrastructure to consumer electronics and cloud computing. Its chip design unit is called HiSilicon.

The Shenzhen-headquartered company designs the Ascend series of data center processors. Huawei then sells these chips as a part of servers that go into data centers to train AI models. Its AI servers are under the brand name Atlas.

The firm's current generation of chip is called the Ascend 910B, and the company is gearing up to launch the Ascend 910C, which could be on par with Nvidia's H100 product, according to a Wall Street Journal report in August.

In its annual report earlier this year, Nvidia explicitly identified Huawei, among other companies, as a competitor in areas such as chips,