To tackle the problem, Huawei has been sending engineers to help customers on site with transferring training code previously written on Cuda into Cann, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Baidu, iFlytek, and Tencent are among the tech companies that have received teams of engineers, these people said.
Huawei declined to comment. Baidu, iFlytek, and Tencent did not respond to requests for comment.
A former Baidu employee said: “Huawei excels at customer service, so of course they have engineers on site at their big customers, helping them to use their chips.”
Huawei can leverage a huge workforce to accelerate the shift. According to the company, more than 50 percent of its 207,000 employees work in research and development, including the engineers dispatched to install technology for customers.
“Huawei’s advantage over Nvidia is it can work closely with its customers,” said technology analyst Tilly Zhang at consultancy Gavekal. “Unlike Nvidia, it has a large team of engineers to help solve clients’ problems and get them to transition to their hardware.”
Huawei has also set up an online portal for developers to give feedback on how its software can be improved.
After the US tightened export controls in October, Huawei raised the price of the Ascend 910B, its chip used for training, by 20 to 30 percent, according to people familiar with the matter.
Huawei’s customers have also expressed concern about supply constraints for the Ascend chip, likely due to manufacturing difficulties, with Chinese companies prevented from buying state-of-the-art chipmaking machinery from the Dutch company ASML.
Huawei has seen strong demand for its AI chips. It reported a 34 percent increase in first-half revenues on Thursday, without providing a breakdown of sales for its different businesses.
More than 50 foundational models have “been trained and iterated” on the Ascend chip, Huawei executive director Zhang Ping’an said at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July.
iFlytek has said its large language model has been trained exclusively on Huawei chips after Huawei sent a group of engineers to its headquarters in Hefei, eastern China, last year to integrate the technology.
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