Investment in AI unicorn signals China’s determination
China is moving swiftly to lead in artificial intelligence (AI) and chip technology, as State-owned funds invest heavily in unicorn start-ups in the fields, experts noted on Thursday.
The latest sign of China moving to reduce foreign reliance on such key technologies came as AI chip unicorn Cambricon announced it raised hundreds of millions of dollars from State-owned funds in a Series B investment round.
Cambricon’s latest investment round raised funds from 13 investors, including the State-owned Capital Venture Capital Fund, the State Development & Investment Corp (SDIC) and CITIC, valuing the company at $2.5 billion. The investment arms of Alibaba and Lenovo also participated in this round.
Cambricon is the largest of many Chinese start-ups involved in AI chips, and it has leading technology.
In 2016, Cambricon made its first deep-learning chip, the Cambricon1A, a world first. After its successful partnership with Huawei, the company developed new chips for client and cloud computing devices, and plans to supply “hundreds of millions of devices” in the next years.
“The Chinese government sees that AI and big data will define the economy of the future,” Xiang Ligang, chief executive of domestic telecom industry news site cctime.com, told the Global Times on Thursday.
New technologies such as 5G and AI will “very soon revolutionize many industries such as healthcare, finance and logistics. By supporting worldleading domestic companies, State funds promote innovation and reduce reliance on foreign products,” said Xiang.
A plan announced by the State Council, China’s cabinet, in July 2017 detailed a plan to mobilize Stateowned investment funds to help develop China’s AI industry and achieve world-leading status by 2030, when it expects AI to grow into a 1 trillion yuan ($153 billion) industry.
Cambricon has been growing fast, supplying chips for top smartphone makers like Huawei, Xiang noted. “Before Qualcomm made AI products, Cambricon already supplied Huawei with AI chips for its most advanced smartphones with very good results. The Chinese government support for Cambricon will help grow the AI industry in China,” he said.
Cambricon’s technology lies at the intersection between semiconductors and AI. Experts note that China at the moment imports most of the traditional semiconductors used in its devices, but in recent years it has achieved substantial progress in innovative chips.
“Chinese companies are technologically quite far behind foreign competitors in mainstream chips, but in AI chips we are very competitive,” Liu Kun, vice general manager of the IC Industry Research Center at CCID Consulting, told the Global Times on Thursday. “The research team of Cambricon comes from the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is very strong in the field of algorithms,” he said.