Huawei Ascend AI Processors Show Its Ambition Despite Tensions

The News: Huawei Technologies has officially unleashed its artificial intelligence (AI) chip Ascend 910, which it says has a maximum power consumption of just 310W–lower than its originally planned specs of 350W. The chip is touted to have "more computing power than any other AI processor", delivering 256 teraflops at half-precision floating point (FP16) and 512 teraflops for integer precision calculations. The Chinese tech giant also announced the commercial availability of its MindSpore AI computing framework, which it said was designed to ease the development of AI applications and improve the efficiencies of such tools. Analyst Take: The news of the Huawei Ascend 910 chip, a powerful AI processor, is a clear sign that Huawei is moving forward with its plans to cut any dependency on the U.S. We saw a similar aggressive course of action from the company just a few weeks ago when it announced Harmony OS, and the intent to make it avaialble to replace Google's Android in the company's smart phones. This would reduce its dependence on U.S. based companies and at the very least could give Huawei smart phones a boost in China.