Huawei to sell servers powered by own chips

SHANGHAI: China’s Huawei, the world’s largest telecom-equipment maker, yesterday said it will sell some servers powered by its own chips for the first time, doubling down on efforts to boost its cloud computing business.

This comes at a time when Huawei, which set up its cloud business unit last year, is trying to gain a firmer foothold in the public cloud market at home that is currently dominated by Alibaba.

Huawei’s semiconductor arm, Hisilicon, already makes some chips the company uses in its smartphones and telecom equipment, but the servers it currently sells to telecom companies and cloud computing clients mostly use Intel chips.

Huawei did not say what percentage of the servers it makes will use its chips.

Its 7 nanometer Ascend 910 chipset, which the firm claims is twice as powerful as its nearest competitor Nvidia’s v100, will be available from the second quarter next year.

Huawei will not sell these chips to third parties, its rotating chairman Eric Xu said at the firm’s annual global partners’ conference, Huawei Connect.

“Since we do not sell to third parties, there is no direct competition between Huawei and chip vendors,” Xu said yesterday, in response to questions about competition from companies such as Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia.

“We provide hardware and cloud computing service.”

Huawei also unveiled Ascend 310, a chipset for computing on smart devices, which is available right away.

Huawei has been trying to boost its profile in the cloud computing market and has teamed up with Microsoft to offer Microsoft apps on Huawei Cloud.