The US government has been imposing similar export controls on China aimed at limiting its ability to mint advanced silicon for years, but the controls apparently didn’t stop Huawei from developing competitive chips for training large AI models.
The Chinese tech giant, which was temporarily crippled by US sanctions half a decade ago, sent samples of its latest AI training chip, called Ascend, to customers this September, according to the South China Morning Post. Companies testing Ascend reportedly include ByteDance, the Chinese parent of TikTok, which is said to be training a large model primarily using Ascend. Baidu, which makes China’s leading search engine and has developed autonomous driving systems, recently placed an order for Huawei’s chips in a shift away from US chip giant Nvidia, according to Reuters. (Nvidia declined to comment.)
Export restrictions aimed at curbing…
