Systems<\/p>\n
It seems like Nvidia\u2019s not getting back into the Middle Kingdom anytime soon<\/p>\n
Chinese web giant Baidu yesterday told investors it sees good days ahead for its Kunlunxin chip biz, because local buyers won\u2019t have alternatives.<\/p>\n
Baidu has previously said it plans to spin out and float Kunlunxin, which makes CUDA-compliant inferencing chips that it uses for its own cloud services and has sold to the likes of Huawei and ZTE, who use them in kit they sell to Chinese telcos.<\/p>\n
Speaking on the company\u2019s Q2 earnings call, Dou Shen, executive veep of Baidu\u2019s AI Cloud Group, said Baidu is working to list Kunlunxin and will have concrete info to share soon.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom a business perspective, we remain very confident in Kunlunxin\u2019s long-term growth and commercial potential for a few reasons,\u201d he said. One of those reasons is that demand for inferencing continues to rise, and Baidu thinks that trend will continue for the long term.<\/p>\n
His second reason was that China\u2019s domestic market has \u201csignificant growth potential\u201d because supply of AI chips is \u201clikely to remain constrained for some time.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAgainst this backdrop, customers are increasingly seeking high performance, reliable, and cost-efficient domestic AI chips.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those remarks are notable in the context of the US government\u2019s policy to allow Nvidia to resume sales of its products into China, and Beijing\u2019s response of giving itself a veto over any purchases by local companies.<\/p>\n
After Washington banned Nvidia from selling its products in China, the company said that decision cost it $10.5 billion in six months. In its most recent results announcement the GPU giant said it had not won any revenue in China after the USA\u2019s policy reversal, and is \u201cuncertain whether any imports will be allowed into the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
And now Baidu is saying Chinese buyers are looking to local chips due to supply challenges.<\/p>\n
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that the Trump administration should encourage chip sales to China, to cement the USA’s dominance of AI. Beijing has encouraged adoption of local tech, in part to reduce dependence on US products.<\/p>\n
Baidu\u2019s earnings included strong growth for its AI business, which saw revenue from cloud infrastructure rental rise 50 percent year over year to almost $1.1 billion, and revenue from the company\u2019s GPU cloud surge 283 percent year-over-year, trumping the 184 percent growth in the last quarter.<\/p>\n
Those numbers are modest compared to the likes of AWS, Google, and Microsoft \u2013 and also a fair way down the charts among Baidu\u2019s Chinese competitors. The company believes owning its own stack of models, infrastructure, and chips will mean it can deliver AI services at keen prices and give it a market advantage. Alibaba makes similar claims and is arguably far ahead of Baidu in terms of model-making capabilities.<\/p>\n
But Baidu has the robo-cab field to itself with the Apollo Go service, which execs said provided over one million fully autonomous rides around the world in Q2.<\/p>\n
Back on the web, execs enthused about low hallucination rates for the company\u2019s consumer-AI services, and an 83 percent year-over-year increase in the number of daily active users for Baidu\u2019s ERNIE assistant \u2013 which saw the number of conversations users stage daily more than triple.<\/p>\n
Overall revenue grew just four percent year-over-year to $3.9 billion, meaning Baidu\u2019s AI cloud is the company\u2019s growth engine. \u00ae <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Systems It seems like Nvidia\u2019s not getting back into the Middle Kingdom anytime soon Chinese web giant Baidu…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":573654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-573653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/573654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}