Reuters According to a report, Huawei plans to sacrifice production of Mate 60 phones at at least one facility to focus on expanding production of its Ascend 910B AI chip.
Huawei manufactures both the Ascend AI chip and the Kirin chip found in the Mate 60 in one facility. However, people familiar with the situation say the factory's production volume is low. Reuters, So the company now plans to prioritize AI chips. Demand for Ascend chips, which support the training of AI models, is increasing in Japan. By delaying production of chips for the Mate 60, Huawei can focus on increasing the number of usable and salable chips from its facilities. Thanks to the Mate 60, Huawei could surpass Apple's mobile phone sales in the country in 2023, the newspaper wrote. South China Morning Postso delaying its production would be an interesting bet regarding the importance of AI to the company.
Chinese AI companies are struggling to source popular AI chips like Nvidia's H100 after the U.S. imposed restrictions on chip exports. This has led Chinese AI developers to use domestic alternatives like Huawei's Ascend 910B chip.
Chinese companies are trying to plant their own flag in the generative AI hype cycle, but they are at a slight development disadvantage compared to the US. Companies like Baidu have made large language models and chatbots publicly available, but they have not yet reached the scale of OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Bard. China was the first country to launch an AI policy, requiring companies developing AI products to go through an approval process before making them available to the public.
