As first reported by Reuters, ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, is planning to train and using chips from fellow Chinese company Huawei. Three anonymous sources approached Reuters with this information; a fourth source couldn’t confirm that ByteDance was using Huawei chips but did say that a new AI model was in development.
Previously, ByteDance’s AI projects used NVIDIA’s H20 AI chips, which were designed for the and avoided the trade restrictions the US government placed in 2022. Chinese customers were only allowed to purchase select models of AI chips, which was an attempt to slow down Chinese technological advancement.
ByteDance has ordered 100,000 Ascend 910B chips from Huawei this year but only received 30,000 of them. Huawei’s Ascend 910B chips are said to be superior to NVIDIA’s A100 chips in GPU performance and computing power efficiency. Nevertheless, the chip shortage halted ByteDance’s AI model development project.
The news isn’t confirmed by ByteDance yet, but it’s not the only company to switch away from NVIDIA products. Many other Chinese companies are slowly transitioning to local chips. Even though ByteDance had previously used to get NVIDIA AI chips, the latest development shows how China is attempting to reduce its dependence on Western products.
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