(Bloomberg) — China’s domestic AI chipmakers are making rapid progress in closing the gap with international leaders, according to SenseTime Group Inc. co-founder Xu Bing.
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Asia has a shortage of computing power for artificial intelligence, lagging significantly behind the US, but China has the talent and data to make up lost ground, Xu said in an interview at the UBS Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong. SenseTime is one of China’s artificial intelligence pioneers, although it has been blacklisted from U.S. investments as part of sweeping American sanctions restricting the country’s advances in AI.
China’s progress in this field has been hampered by U.S. trade controls that prevent the import of Nvidia Corp.’s advanced AI accelerators. That has sparked a need for domestic alternatives from companies like Huawei Technologies Co. and Shanghai Biren Technology Co., which are also subject to U.S. trade restrictions.
“There is a scarcity of resources here in Asia in general,” Xu told Bloomberg’s David Ingles. “It’s a 10x difference in the computing resources we have here compared to the U.S. leaders. But I think Asian markets never lack talent and never lack data.”
Xu added that domestic chips in China are catching up quickly and SenseTime is working with local semiconductor companies to expand the computing capabilities they have. He didn’t name specific companies, but Huawei has quietly become the champion of chip technology development in China, having successfully bypassed U.S. restrictions to develop its own advanced smartphone processor last year.
Xu said it’s unclear how far China is behind the U.S. now, with some people estimating a year and others three years. But he said the country’s disadvantage in terms of computing power will not be permanent.
“Computing is a commodity,” he said. “In the long term, computing will not be a gap.”
Alongside Huawei and Biren, another chipmaker that has shown promise in the field of AI is Moore Threads Intelligent Beijing Co. Chinese Premier Li Qiang met with Moore Threads CEO in March on a visit to the country’s leading AI and chipmaking companies, including AI developer and chipmaking equipment maker Naura Technology Group Ltd.
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