Huawei Unveils New Artificial Intelligence Chips Among Chinese Technology Ambitions

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China's Huawei Technologies Co Ltd [HWT.UL], the world's largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, unveiled Wednesday an artificial intelligence chip intended to power its servers, in order to boost its nascent cloud computing activity.

This decision, which will see Huawei using its own chips for the first time on its servers, comes as China seeks to accelerate the development of its semiconductor market, while the United States faces a fierce trade stalemate that uses imported technology.

China wants chips manufactured locally inside 40% of all smartphones on the domestic market by 2025 and puts billions of dollars on local champions to achieve this.

Huawei created its cloud computing business unit last year and is now trying to strengthen its presence in the national public cloud market, currently dominated by Alibaba. The unit represents a small portion of Huawei's overall sales, but that's what it sees as an engine of potential growth.

The new 7 nanometer Ascend 910 chipset that Huawei unveiled at the annual global conference of its partners will serve this unit and is aimed at data centers that are transforming mountains of data.

The chip will process the data much faster than competing products, said Eric Xu, Huawei's current chairman, adding that he was twice as powerful as the v100 of his closest competitor, Nvidia.

Huawei also unveiled another chip that can be used to power surveillance cameras. It is expected that the Ascend 310 will help make the AI ​​cheaper for hardware companies by allowing them to buy ready-made modules for business. 39; adapt to their own products.

The Ascend 910 will be available from the second quarter of 2019 and the 310 is already on the shelves.

COMPETITION IN THE UNITED STATES

Huawei said it would not sell these chipsets separately to its customers, but that its efforts would still place it against big US providers such as Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia.

Huawei does not expect, however, to "direct competition" with other suppliers, because it will not sell to third parties, said Xu at the conference Huawei Connect.

Huawei already manufactures its own processor for its high-end phones, but has so far mainly used Intel and Nvidia chips in its servers. The company is the world's second largest smartphone manufacturer.

The company will use a combination of its chips and those of other vendors in its servers to meet different prices, said Qiu Heng, president of marketing for Huawei's companies.

We did not know how many Intel or Nvidia components would be replaced.

Huawei's efforts to expand its domestic operations are compounded by growing fears that Western consumers may be reluctant to buy Chinese technology products because of concerns about security risks and allegations of espionage in Beijing.

Bloomberg announced last week that some 30 US corporate systems had been infiltrated by malicious chips inserted by Chinese intelligence agents.

Huawei has long been banned from selling telecommunications equipment in the United States. In August, Australia also banned providing equipment for the country's planned 5G mobile network.

The company has repeatedly denied allegations of espionage.