- Tencent president Martin Lau mentioned on Wednesday the corporate is holding an enormous stockpile of chips.
- Its stock is sufficient to final its AI improvement a “couple extra generations,” Lau mentioned.
- The US issued a brand new AI chip export ban to China in October, sparking fears that Tencent may very well be hit.
A high Tencent exec mentioned on Wednesday that the Chinese language tech large is holding an enormous stockpile of Nvidia processors, downplaying fears that new US export bans would possibly cripple its enterprise.
“Now by way of the chip scenario, proper now we even have one of many largest stock of AI chips in China amongst all of the gamers,” Tencent president Martin Lau mentioned in a Q3 earnings name.
Lau mentioned Tencent was one of many first in China to place in massive orders for the H800 chip, the GPU particularly created by Nvidia for the China market. In October, the Biden administration banned the export of the H800 to China as a part of a broader transfer to curb China’s — particularly the Chinese language army’s — entry to US expertise and superior semiconductors.
Lau addressed considerations that enterprise could be affected, saying Tencent’s stockpile of H800 chips is massive sufficient to maintain improvement of its AI mannequin, Hunyuan, for the foreseeable future.
“We now have sufficient chips to proceed our improvement of Hunyuan for a minimum of a pair extra generations,” Lau mentioned. “So the ban does not likely have an effect on the event of Hunyuan and our AI functionality within the close to future.”
However Lau additionally mentioned Tencent will finally should pivot towards China-made AI chips.
“Going ahead, we’ve got to determine methods to make utilization of our AI chips extra environment friendly,” Lau mentioned.
Superior chips just like the H800 are key to tech corporations staying aggressive in AI , as a result of they’re important to the quicker coaching of fashions. Chinese language tech corporations like Tencent and Alibaba have largely relied on US-made chips.
Nvidia’s H100, for instance, was the chip used to coach OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT.
The US initially banned the export of the H100 and equal fashions to China, however Nvidia later launched new variations of these chips, together with the H800, designed as workaround processors to ship to China.
So the US banned exports of these new chips, too.
Earlier than the ban, nonetheless, China’s largest tech gamers akin to Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent collectively spent $5 billion to stockpile a complete 100,000 superior chips from Nvidia, The Monetary Occasions reported in August.
Chinese language corporations are quickly debuting new AI fashions to rival their US counterparts, however have to this point been enjoying catch-up.
Tencent’s mannequin, Hunyuan, is predicted to focus totally on gaming and enterprise software program, that are key pillars of the tech agency’s enterprise.
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