To avoid the spirit of Nvidia: ByteDance will train a new AI model exclusively on Huawei accelerators

The Chinese company ByteDance plans to develop a new AI model trained on Ascend 910B artificial intelligence accelerators from Huawei Technologies. ByteDance has been consistently diversifying its computing infrastructure by targeting Chinese semiconductor manufacturers. The company has also accelerated the development of its own AI accelerators.

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Speaking on condition of confidentiality, several sources said ByteDance’s next step in the AI ​​race will be to use Huawei’s Ascend 910B chip to train its own large AI language model. Previously, the company used this accelerator mainly for less computationally intensive tasks based on pre-trained AI models.

Training AI models requires a huge amount of computing resources. Today, the most powerful AI accelerators are the latest Nvidia GPUs, which have become unavailable to Chinese companies due to US sanctions policies. Therefore, the capabilities and complexity of the new model, which uses Huawei Ascend 910B chips, will be lower than that of the existing ByteDance Doubao AI model, trained using Nvidia processors.

ByteDance’s current AI technology is used in its flagship large language model, released in August 2023. It powers the Doubao chatbot and many other apps, including the Jimeng text-to-video tool. These apps are becoming increasingly popular, and ByteDance’s chatbot has become one of the most popular apps in China with more than 10 million monthly active users.

ByteDance ordered more than 100,000 Ascend 910B chips this year but received fewer than 30,000 as of July, too few to meet the company’s needs. Delivery delays and the limited computing power of these chips make it difficult to predict when the new AI model will appear, the sources said.

Commenting on the situation, ByteDance spokesman Michael Hughes said: “The entire premise here is wrong. No new model is being developed.” However, sources claim that ByteDance is one of the largest buyers of Huawei AI chips and plans to train its new model on them.

The company has become the largest buyer of Nvidia’s H20 AI chip, which the US manufacturer adapted for the Chinese market in response to US trade restrictions. ByteDance reportedly spent $2 billion on Nvidia chips last year. The company is also Microsoft’s first-largest Asian cloud computing customer.