Huawei desires to dethrone NVIDIA in China, seize important market share in AI chips – Firstpost

Huawei is making massive strikes to seize a bigger share of China’s AI chip market, setting its sights on dethroning NVIDIA, which has lengthy been the dominant participant. The corporate desires to place its new AI chipsets because the go-to selection for native companies, significantly with regards to coaching giant language fashions (LLMs). This daring technique might shift the dynamics in China’s AI chip business.

Whereas NVIDIA has been hit by US export restrictions stopping it from supplying superior AI chips to China, the corporate nonetheless holds a robust place available in the market on account of its highly effective GPUs. Huawei, nonetheless, has its eyes on difficult NVIDIA in a unique space — ‘inference’ duties. These are the real-time purposes the place educated AI fashions are used to make predictions or resolve duties. Huawei believes this space will see much more demand sooner or later and sees it as the right alternative to supply a aggressive different to NVIDIA.

What’s inference and why it issues to Huawei?

Inference is all about operating reside knowledge via an AI mannequin that’s already been educated, utilizing that data to make choices, predictions, or resolve particular issues. In contrast to the coaching section, which occurs much less typically, inference is a steady course of that can drive rising demand for AI chips as AI know-how progresses. Huawei sees this as a significant space the place its chips can shine.

Georgios Zachaeopoulous, a senior AI researcher at Huawei’s Zurich lab, famous that whereas coaching is vital, it’s one thing that solely occurs sometimes. In distinction, inference shall be utilized by way more prospects, creating a bigger and extra constant demand for chips in the long term.

Huawei’s technique and authorities help

Huawei’s strategy isn’t nearly {hardware}; the corporate can also be working exhausting to develop the proper software program to verify its chips can do the job. Since NVIDIA’s chips and Huawei’s Ascend chips require completely different software program to perform, Huawei helps Chinese language corporations undertake new instruments that can work seamlessly with its AI chips.

To make issues much more fascinating, Huawei is getting a lift from the Chinese language authorities, which has been encouraging native corporations to decide on Huawei’s AI chips over NVIDIA’s. Many consultants are actually saying that Huawei is probably the most critical menace to NVIDIA in China, making the competitors even fiercer.

Challenges for Huawei

After all, Huawei isn’t with out its challenges. Its Ascend chips, whereas robust on a person foundation, face points with regards to connecting a number of chips collectively. That is particularly vital when coaching giant AI fashions, the place duties should be cut up throughout a number of chips. If one chip fails, the system has to rapidly shift the work to the others, and that may trigger delays.

One other hurdle for Huawei is convincing Chinese language companies to change from NVIDIA’s well-established Cuda software program to Huawei’s personal proprietary instruments. NVIDIA’s software program is deeply built-in into the AI ecosystem, so getting corporations to make the swap might take a while.

Regardless of these challenges, Huawei just isn’t backing down. The corporate is already engaged on enhancing its chips with the brand new Ascend 910C processor, which it claims will resolve a number of the earlier points. Whether or not Huawei can efficiently chip away at NVIDIA’s lead in China’s AI market remains to be up within the air, but it surely’s clear the race is heating up.