Huawei eyes Nvidia’s share of China’s AI chip market

Huawei is looking to find ways to take over Nvidia’s share of China’s AI chip market, as the company looks to position its new AI chips as the first choice for local companies when it comes to training LLM students. The move could ultimately turn the tables in Huawei’s favor.

Nvidia cannot supply advanced AI chips due to US export controls, but it still has a significant stake in China’s AI chip market due to its powerful graphics processing units.

While Huawei is now looking to find ways to take over Nvidia’s share of China’s AI chip market, the idea is to challenge the US chipmaker to “reasoning” tasks rather than training LLM students.

Reasoning refers to the process of running live data through a trained AI model to predict or solve a task. It’s a test of how well a student can apply and use “learned information” while training an AI model to complete a task.

Huawei aims to end Chinese companies’ reliance on Nvidia for inference tasks, and believes inference will become a bigger source of demand for AI chips in the future. “Training is important, but it happens only a few times,” said Georgios Zakaiopoulos, a senior AI researcher who works on accelerating inference at Huawei’s Zurich lab. “Huawei is primarily focused on inference, which will ultimately serve more customers.”