Chinese AI developer switches from Nvidia to Huawei processors
The Chinese company Z.ai (formerly Zhipu AI) did not wait for Trump to be in a good mood and adapted its GLM large language models to run on Huawei Ascend servers with Kirin chips, abandoning foreign nVidia technologies.
Z.ai is a Chinese startup developing large-scale language models that has received $1.4 billion in investment and plans to organise a public offering next year.
The move signals a deeper integration of large-scale AI models and local computing architecture. Z.ai calls this an important breakthrough in the interaction of cloud models with smart devices made on Chinese components, which promotes the idea of technological independence.
Huawei, for its part, has opened access to the CANN (Compute Architecture for Neural Networks) platform, a software toolkit for working with Ascend processors. CANN is now open source, giving developers the freedom to create and reducing dependence on the closed Nvidia CUDA ecosystem.
This event signals two important processes in the modern technological world. First, the US is failing to enforce its sanctions properly. Huawei, which is subject to perhaps the most severe sanctions of any major Chinese technology company, can build modern chips using modern technologies. Although Huawei has its own chip manufacturing facility, it has not been able to develop new lithography processes. No other Chinese company had this technology. And yet, Huawei continues to develop and produce new chips.
Secondly, Nvidia is trying to prove that if it is not allowed to sell the H20 chip to China, the country will find another supplier and the green company will lose its market and profits. Chinese chips may be slower than H100, but they are not sold in China anyway. Nvidia is only allowed to sell H20, and they are trying to ban it. So there is a possibility that Huawei has technologies that can compete with H20. Moreover, even a weak Huawei chip is better than no chip at all if sanctions are tightened.
Source: www.huaweicentral.com
