(Bloomberg) — China’s domestic AI chipmakers are making rapid progress in closing the gap with international leaders, said Xu Bing, co-founder of SenseTime Group Inc.
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Asia is short on artificial intelligence computing power and lags significantly behind the US, but China has the talent and data to make up for lost ground, Xu said in an interview at the UBS Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong. SenseTime is one of China’s pioneers in artificial intelligence, although it has been placed on a US investment blacklist as part of sweeping US sanctions restricting the country’s progress in AI.
China’s progress in this area has been hampered by US trade controls that restrict imports of Nvidia Corp.’s advanced AI accelerators. obstruct. That has led to the need for domestic alternatives from companies like Huawei Technologies Co. and Shanghai Biren Technology Co., both of which are also subject to U.S. trade restrictions.
“There is a resource shortage here in Asia in general,” Xu told Bloomberg’s David Ingles. “It’s a 10-fold gap in the computing resources we have here compared to America’s leaders. But I think the Asian markets are never short of talent and never short of data.”
Xu added that domestic chips in China are quickly catching up and that SenseTime is working with local semiconductor companies to expand the computing capabilities available to them. He didn’t name specific companies, but Huawei has quietly become China’s champion of chip technology development after successfully bypassing US restrictions last year to develop its own advanced smartphone processor.
Xu said it is not clear how far behind the US now, with some people estimating one year and others three years. But he said the country’s disadvantage in computing power will not be permanent.
“Compute is a commodity,” he says. “In the long run, computing will no longer be a hole.”
Besides Huawei and Biren, Moore Threads Intelligent Beijing Co is another chipmaker that has shown promise in the AI field. Chinese Premier Li Qiang met with the CEO of Moore Threads in March during a tour of the country’s top AI and chip makers, including AI developers. Baidu Inc. and chip manufacturer Naura Technology Group Ltd.
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