Huawei unveils 3-year plan to catch Nvidia

CEO presents latest version of AI chips

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Security officers keep watch in front of an AI (artificial intelligence) sign at the annual Huawei Connect event in Shanghai in 2019.

(REUTERS)

Huawei Technologies Co openly admits its silicon can’t match Nvidia Corp's in raw power and speed.

So to pack the same punch, China’s national champion is counting on its traditional strengths: brute force, networking, and policy support.

Huawei on Thursday took the rare step of publicising a three-year vision for eroding Nvidia's dominance in the AI boom. Rotating Chairman Eric Xu outlined the technology the Shenzhen-based company envisions in painstaking detail during its annual Huawei Connect conference, triggering wall-to-wall media coverage.

The unusually loud fanfare — emerging a day before US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held their second phone meeting in four months — stands in contrast with Huawei’s typically more subdued approach. The secretive company has introduced successive generations of AI products without even a press release after it lost access to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the go-to chipmaker for Nvidia, in 2020 due to US curbs.

Huawei has also not specified the technology of mobile processors in its latest smartphones in recent years — industry experts had to break down devices to figure out their technological innards.

On Thursday, the company trumpeted its grand plan with all the drama of an Nvidia launch. Mr Xu took the stage to present the next generation of AI chips, twinned with its upgraded “SuperPod” designs — a term borrowed from Nvidia's own playbook that refers to a data centre platform that encompasses computing, storage, networking, software and infrastructure management technologies.