Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – The chip blocking rule from the United States (US) to China will have an impact on technology giants, one of which is Tencent. For this reason, the company has prepared itself by buying AI chips from the US before the blocking regulations take effect.
In fact, Tencent already has a sufficient supply of AI chips for the next few generations.
The US is known to have banned the export of more AI chips to China. Tencent President Martin Lau explained that this decision made his party use stock more efficiently.
However, he confirmed that US policy would not have an impact in the short term. The company still has enough US-origin Nvidia chips to continue development of the Hunyuan AI model.
“We have to look for ways to make more efficient use of our AI chips,” he said, quoted from Reuters, Monday (20/11/2023).
Even so, Lau also added that Tencent will continue to try to find alternative sources for other local chip makers.
Tencent already has stock of Nvidia’s H800 AI chip. However, the new US rules cover such chips and the best way to utilize them is to use them only for the most important part i.e. 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.
On the other hand, US policies have an impact on Tencent’s cloud services.
For information, Nvidia dominates 90% of the AI chip market from China. This means that US export restrictions will make it difficult for Chinese companies with ambitions to develop AI.
However, Chinese players are trying to cover this by turning to local chipmakers. For example, Baidu ordered 1,600 Huawei Ascend 910B chips.
[Gambas:Video CNBC]
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