Huawei, soon to be the Chinese emperor of AI chips ?

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In China, the race for generative artificial intelligence (AI) is well underway, but is being slowed by U.S. restrictions preventing local giants from accessing the most powerful AI chips. Against this backdrop, Huawei has hatched an ambitious plan to supply its peers with cutting-edge semiconductors.

Chips for inference

Because for now, it is NVIDIA that is favored by companies in the Middle Kingdom, even if they only have access to the H20 bridled chip. It is, in fact, more efficient than local solutions. While the United States has further strengthened its restrictions on exports of cutting-edge chips, Huawei is moving up a gear.

According to the Financial Times, the company has decided to focus on processors dedicated to inference, that is to say the process by which a model uses input data (prompts) to make predictions or draw conclusions. Training, another major aspect of generative AI, is therefore likely to be sidelined by Huawei, which believes that inference will become a greater source of demand in the future.

Its most recent chip, the Ascend 910C, was designed with this in mind. And the Chinese giant is getting a little help from its government to promote it to the country's companies. Thus, an active support strategy is being put in place, because the goal is to convince them to leave NVIDIA's highly acclaimed Cuda architecture in favor of Ascend.

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Huawei teams are working directly with customers to facilitate this transition, with an emphasis on the potential of the chips rather than their pure technical specifications.

A crucial issue for Huawei… and for China

Significant challenges remain, particularly technical ones. The performance of Ascend chips has yet to be proven on a large scale, and competing with NVIDIA is no small feat, especially since Chinese companies’ dependence on the American manufacturer is deeply rooted.

Huawei is sparing no effort, with massive investments in the development of its software ecosystem. Similarly, partnerships are being established with Chinese universities and research centers to improve chip performance.

This is a crucial issue for China, which is seeking to reduce its dependence on American cutting-edge technologies, particularly in the artificial intelligence sector. Huawei, for its part, has embarked on a deep diversification of its activities to survive the heavy American sanctions weighing on it since 2019. Semiconductors are one of the cornerstones of this project.

• Huawei aims to compete with Huawei in the AI ​​chip sector in China.
• Its project is to offer chips dedicated to inference rather than training models.
• More generally, China is seeking to reduce its dependence on cutting-edge American technologies.

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