[News] US Reportedly Clears China’s Black Sesame Huashan A2000 Auto Chip for Global Launch

Amid a surge of Chinese GPU and AI chip firms entering the capital market, another player in the autonomous driving sector is making waves. According to Chinese media outlets ijiwei, on January 4, Black Sesame Technologies’ high-performance, all-scenario autonomous driving chip, Huashan A2000, has cleared reviews by the U.S. Department of Commerce and Defense, securing approval for global sales and deployment — a notable breakthrough despite U.S. chip controls.

It is worth noting that the A2000 chip successfully taped out in January 2025 and drew scrutiny from U.S. authorities due to its ultra-high performance, the report notes. After nearly a year of technical clarifications and discussions, it finally received approval, making Black Sesame Technologies the only Chinese company to pass this type of review, the report adds.

The report highlights that the Huashan A2000, built on a 7nm process, integrates a high-performance CPU, GPU, NPU, and multiple dedicated computing units. Its processor, the Huashan A1000, has been recognized as China’s first automotive-grade single-SoC platform supporting a single domain controller for both driving and parking, and is featured in vehicles from top Chinese automakers including FAW, Dongfeng, Geely, and JAC, the company stated.

According to ijiwei, the Huashan A2000’s real-world performance rivals the world’s top autonomous driving chips. The chip reportedly supports FP16/FP8 floating-point as well as INT4/INT8/INT16 precision computations, and is paired with the mature AI toolchain BaRT, enabling highly efficient end-to-end development from model training to deployment.

For more technological details, another report from facetop suggests that the Huashan A2000 features a 16-core Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU delivering 10× the performance of the A1000, a 6-core Arm Cortex-R52 MCU with 20K+ DMIPS, the proprietary NeuralIQ ISP with 150dB HDR, and the new Jiushao NPU with multi-core shared caches.

Notably, the company had already showcased the Huashan A2000 at CES 2025, and is set to participate in CES 2026, taking place January 6–9.

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(Photo credit: Black Sesame Technologies)