About three months after Huawei Technologies was added to Washington’s trade blacklist in 2019, the company’s then-rotating chairman, Eric Xu Zhijun, unveiled what he proclaimed as the “world’s most powerful AI processor” – the Ascend 910 – designed for training artificial intelligence (AI) models. Huawei’s advanced AI chip initiative, however, suddenly faced a major obstacle a year later in August 2020, when the US Commerce Department tightened restrictions by barring the sale of semiconductor...