Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Tencent said it still has a large supply of AI chips from US manufacturer Nvidia. But the Joe Bide government’s complete block on high-end chip sales to China will still impact its cloud services.
Tencent President Martin Lau said the US decision last month to ban exports of more chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) to China would force the company to use existing stockpiles more efficiently, and look for domestically produced alternatives.
Tencent has enough Nvidia chips to continue development of its “Hunyuan” AI model for at least several more generations, so the restrictions won’t affect AI capabilities in the short term.
“We have to look for ways to make more efficient use of our AI chips,” he said, quoted from ReutersFriday (17/11/2023).
“And we will also try to find domestic sources for these training chips,” added Lau.
However, the new rules will impact cloud services where Tencent sells computing power to clients.
Companies feel the chip ban actually impacts their ability to resell the use of these AI chips through their cloud services.
Nvidia dominates about 90% of China’s AI chip market, meaning expanding US export restrictions have made it difficult for Chinese companies with AI ambitions to cope.
Some companies have turned to domestic chipmakers such as Huawei Technologies, a trend that analysts have called a threat to Nvidia’s leadership.
Reuters reported last week that Tencent rival Baidu had ordered 1,600 Huawei Ascend 910B chips.
Tencent has stock of the H800 AI chip that Nvidia developed specifically for China last year in response to previous export restrictions – but the new regulations also cover that.
It is said that one of the best ways to utilize the H800 chip is to reserve it for the most important part of AI model development, namely model training.
“We will try to see if we can move a lot of the inference capabilities to the low-performance chips so that we can keep most of the high-performance AI chips for training purposes,” Lau said.
[Gambas:Video CNBC]
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