Huawei eyeing cutting edge in computing

Huawei Technologies Co underlined its long-term commitment to computing on Wednesday, by unveiling the world's fastest artificial intelligence training cluster and its $1.5 billion investment plan to support third-party software and hardware developers.

The move came as Huawei sees computing as a technology of the utmost importance to building a fully connected, intelligent world and it eyes an expanded presence in the computing market which research company Gartner Inc forecast will be worth more than $2 trillion by 2023.

"We believe that connectivity and computing will be woven into the fabric of everything and are worth our continuous investment," said Hu Houkun, rotating chairman of Huawei.

According to Hu, Huawei already has made significant strides in connectivity for the past 30 years, from 2G all the way up to 5G.

In terms of computing, Huawei will continue investing with a strategy that focuses on four key areas. "We will push the boundaries of architecture, invest in processors for all scenarios, keep clear business boundaries, and build an open ecosystem," Hu added.

The senior executive highlighted that the evolution of computing has come to a inflection point, with AI-enabled computing becoming mainstream and offering tons of emerging opportunities for Huawei.

On Wednesday, the company unveiled what it said is the world's fastest AI training cluster, Atlas 900, which will help make AI more readily available for different fields of scientific research and business innovation.

Atlas 900 combines the power of thousands of Ascend processors, and Huawei showcased how fast Atlas 900 is with an example of using it in astronomy.

Usually, if an astronomer wanted to find a celestial body with specific features in a sky map which contains more than 200,000 stars, it would take 169 days of full-time work.

But Atlas 900 is able to scan through mountains of data to locate and identify a specific type of star in only 10 seconds, Huawei said.

As part of its broader push to build a vibrant ecosystem, Huawei also announced that it will invest $1.5 billion to help cultivate five million more third-party software and hardware developers on its computing platform over the next five years, up from the current number of 1.3 million.

The money will be used to help developers develop the next generation of intelligent applications and solutions. Half of the plan includes developers who use Huawei's Kunpeng server chips. Kunpeng is based on the ARM architecture, a chip design developed by the British company Arm Holdings and commonly used in smartphones and tablets.

A string of companies had tried to develop server chips based on ARM, but most of them failed.

Huawei said many experts are worried that ARM-based server chips can not deliver computing performance strong enough for internet data centers. But it has leveraged its own technological prowess to solve the problem, which can be seen in the increasing use of its Kunpeng products by many tech companies.

Charlie Dai, principal analyst at Forrester, a business strategy and economic consultancy, said Huawei's computing strategy demonstrates the importance of leveraging holistic hardware and software spectrum and fully unleashing the power of AI in the cloud era.

ARM-based chips have unique value for computing. Huawei's investment in ARM-based servers not only supports broader business scenarios. It also effectively improves business agility in the increasingly dynamic macroeconomic environments, Dai added.