Recently, iFlytek, an AI company based in China, released its Spark AI model for the public. Unlike other countries, companies in China go through a lot of security assessments and require clearance from the government to release products to the public. But, China has been bullish on generative AI and thus the company was quickly allowed to release its product. 

Interestingly, Liu Qingfeng, the founder and chairman of iFlytek, claimed that Chinese multinational tech company Huawei’s GPU capabilities are now on par with NVIDIA’s A100 GPUs. Though Huawei has never actually said that it is developing its GPUs for AI capabilities, Qingfeng’s comments about the astounding capabilities of the hardware definitely confirms that the company is making strides to fight against NVIDIA’s monopoly. 

Adding to this, Qingfeng said that the company wants to release a general purpose AI model by October to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and with GPT-4 by the first of 2024. According to him, these ambitious plans wouldn’t have been possible without Huawei’s enhanced GPUs given the computational capabilities of the country’s hardware were lagging behind NVIDIA all this while. 

This was confirmed by Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, in a recent interaction with AIM. “Huawei is definitely a very formidable company,” said Huang. “They just caught up with A100s and we have to acknowledge that Huawei is one of the most technologically advanced companies in the world. Even without technological access, it is incredible what they did with their latest phone.” He further explained that Huawei has been an extraordinary company even before all the geo-political tensions. 

Huawei is building China’s self-reliance

The US sanctions on NVIDIA for not exporting its chips to China has been constraining the country’s development even further. To curb this, Huawei has its own plans. 

In 2019, Huawei released the Ascend 910 AI processor which is based on Ascend-Max chipsets. Eric Xu, the rotating chairman of Huawei said, “Without a doubt, it has more computing power than any other AI processor in the world”, taking a dig on NVIDIA’s A100s. Interestingly, Ascend 910 accelerator delivered 256 TeraFLOPs of power for tensor floating point operations with just 310 W of max power, compared to 312 TeraFlops of NVIDIA A100, with 400 W of max power. This Ascend 910 powers Huawei’s Atlas 900 Pod A2 AI training cluster, which is possibly being used by iFlytek for its AI efforts. 

In 2020, Huawei announced that it would be entering the GPU market soon. Even though the TFlops are not the only parameters for comparing the capabilities of GPUs, Huawei’s GPUs still are comparatively coming close to what NVIDIA’s are capable of.

Along this, Huawei has also been venturing into the phone market and fulfilling China’s self-reliance dreams. For this, Huawei decided to build its own smaller chips for developing its own phones. 

In 2022, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) successfully built a 7-nanometer processor, which is powered by Kirin 9000S chip. Interestingly, Huawei’s latest phone, Mate 60 Pro is built on top of this 7-nanometer processor. Huawei is building the country’s self-reliance dreams by partnering with others within the country. 

Moreover, China has realised that it can compete against US companies such as NVIDIA and Apple with Huawei’s support. It decided to ban the use of Apple iPhones for government officials and employees upon realising that it is one of the biggest markets for Apple and generates around a fifth of the revenue for the company. Faced with the US sanctions through NVIDIA, China decided to end its reliance on any US company, hitting Apple where it hurts. No surprises there.

The Apple of China

Huawei released its Mate 60 Pro just weeks before Apple was supposed to release iPhone 15 on September 12. The 7-nanometer based phone is still behind Apple’s 4-nanometer chip based iPhone, but it could definitely make a dent at the iPhone maker’s revenue given the ban. After the launch of Huawei’s new phone, the stock prices of Apple tumbled 6 percent between Wednesday and Friday last week, resulting in nearly $200 billion off the value of the company. 

Though regular citizens of China can still buy the new iPhone in the country, the sanctions and bans definitely bring up the question for US companies operating in China. There is a possibility that the country might decide to ban its products completely in the near future, and Huawei might come out as the champion for the country in its AI, chipmaking, phone market, and thus the self-reliance mission.

All in all, even though NVIDIA is undoubtedly one of the leaders when it comes to AI and chipmaking, and Apple is definitely the leading phone company in China, there is very little reason to believe that Huawei can completely take away the market leadership position from these tech giants.  But Huawei is definitely on the rise on many different fronts, and as confirmed by Huang, and the current updates and releases, Huawei might possibly become the Apple or NVIDIA of China.