SenseTime using Huawei Ascend 910C AI chips instead of Nvidia

China’s SenseTime Group is using numerous Huawei Ascend 910C AI chips in its large language models. The company said that they opt for China-made processors to accelerate the development of the AI computing ecosystem in the country.

SenseTime Group is an AI company in Hong Kong, China. It develops techs like facial recognition, object detection, optical character recognition, image, as well as video analysis, autonomous driving, remote sensing, and large AI models.

U.S. sanctions hit many Chinese companies years back and SenseTime is one of them. The OEM can not access advanced technologies for its next-gen AI LLMs. The same case is with Huawei which is facing difficulties but aims for self-reliance.

SenseTime is seemingly helping Huawei expand its AI chip ecosystem in the country. In a recent interrogation, the Vice President of SenseTime – Alvin Zou revealed that their new AI Data Center uses a “lot of” Huawei Ascend 910C AI chips.

Apart from Huawei, Biren Technology and some other Chinese chipmakers have provided AI processors for the new data center. Alvin pointed out that Huawei’s Ascend 910C delivers significant performance improvement over other AI chipsets.

He further notes that China-made AI chips lag at some points compared to foreign processors. Yet, they are inching closer to better performance day by day.

“There are still some gaps between domestic chips and foreign ones in terms of training but in the field of inference chips, the performance of Chinese products is getting closer to that of foreign ones.” – said Alvin Zou.

Huawei is establishing itself as a major alternative to its foreign rivals for its Chinese customers. Whether it is Apple in the smartphone market or Nvidia in the AI chipset space. Although it’s still a few steps away from the U.S. chip producer.

Huawei AI chips (Image Credits: Huawei)

As per Bernstein Research, Huawei owns only 10% of the Chinese AI chip market whereas, Nvidia has 90%. It’s no less than an AI chip dominator in China.

Nvidia even said in an interview that it still receives more than expected orders for H20 every month despite China’s promotion of its home-ground AI chips.

Huawei and other Chinese chipmakers lack advanced chipmaking tools like EUV that help in improved chip fabrication. Yet, they are trying their best to rise in this game.

China is also constantly encouraging its firms and customers to use Huawei AI chips to boost AI computing ecosystem development in the country. iFlytek, for instance, launched recent AI models equipped with Huawei’s AI processors.

As more Chinese customers opt for Huawei Ascend AI chips, the company will progress in the chipset field. Huawei has started taking on consumers for AI Ascend 910C chip sampling. Let’s see how this activity progresses in the time ahead.

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