Huawei to invest $1.5 billion in AI ecosystem for next 5 years

“Huawei will invest 1.5 billion dollars over the next five years in creating a global artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem,” said the deputy director of the smart computing marketing team at the Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. “The investment will be used to nurture one million AI developers and support 3,000 software development partners and 1,000 universities and research centers.”

The Chinese IT company has made the decision based on its AI development roadmap, which will bring about a seismic change across all areas between 2020 and 2031. According to the roadmap, the era of “general AI” will begin by 2030 where autonomous cars, smart diagnosis and linguistic semantic analysis will be available, and the world will enter the “super AI” era after 2030 where humanoids can be made. In both cases, chips that are as conscious and aware as human brains play a vital role.

Huawei will apply AI technologies to all of its products. It is especially focusing on developing AI chips that will enable AI technologies. “A Neural Processing Unit (NPU) with Huawei-developed ‘Da Vinci architecture’ performs 4,090 calculations when an existing CPU calculates once,” the deputy director said.

By heavily investing in AI chips, the Chinese IT firm aims to make its technologies global standards in the AI industry. “The more companies use our products, the more likely our products will become standards,” said the deputy director. “That is what we mean by creating an ecosystem”.


Wan-Jun Yun zeitung@donga.com