Huawei eyes world’s largest AI computing platform
Huawei aims to help build the world’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) computing platform by working with a major national laboratory, offering its self-developed chipsets as fundamental architecture to compete with Intel and NVIDIA.
The Pengcheng laboratory, a government-owned lab in Shenzhen, released a new AI computing platform on Friday called Cloud Brain II, with Huawei’s Atlas 900, the world’s fastest AI training cluster.
Huawei launched Atlas 900 in September to make AI more readily available for different fields of scientific research and business innovation. The cluster is powered by its self-developed chipsets Kunpeng and Ascend processors, competing with Intel’s dominant X86 architecture.
Huawei, which has been under the US-led crackdown over the past year, has been increasing its investment in self-developed technologies, especially chipsets, which could be used in full-scale scenarios ranging from servers and base stations, to smartphones, PCs, and AI domains.
“We hope to offer the world a new choice,” said Hou Jinlong, president of Huawei’s Cloud and AI Products and Services.
The chipset, Kunpeng 920, used in the Cloud Brain AI computing, is expected to be faster than the X86, with 30 percent lower energy consumption.
Our generation has grown up using Intel and NVIDIA technologies, Hou said, expressing hope that the Chinese company’s self-developed chipsets will become the new fundamental architecture for AI computing worldwide.
After the US government blacklisted Huawei and restricted American companies from exporting components to it, the Chinese company has been accelerating the development of proprietary chipsets, which could become alternatives.
However, placing Huawei on the entity list will have significant ramifications for US suppliers, as they provide about one-seventh of Huawei components, and out of $70 billion Huawei spent buying components in 2018, $11 billion went to US firms including Qualcomm, Intel, and Micron Technology, according to data provided by the Chinese company.
“The best thing for the tech world is to cooperate, but there’s no other choice,” said Xiang Ligang of the Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance. He noted that challenges helped increase the Chinese company’s competitiveness.