Huawei recruited Nvidia employees, preparing to play with the company in GPU production?

According to Korean media, Huawei is said to be planning to enter the market for manufacturing graphics processing chips (GPUs), which have been witnessing a two-horse race for many years between AMD and Nvidia. Accordingly, the Chinese technology giant is currently setting up a branch to research and produce GPUs in Korea.

However, Huawei will not face Nvidia and AMD in developing GPUs for individual users. Instead, Huawei will target customers who are technology businesses, which use specialized GPUs in giant server systems, serving cloud computing tasks and artificial intelligence. This is also the niche market Nvidia currently dominates.

In order to realize its ambitions, Huawei is said to have enticed and recruited a series of former key personnel of Nvidia to develop graphics chips. This is a move that is considered suitable for Huawei. Recently, Chinese technology firms often want to develop homegrown technologies as much as possible, thereby reducing the dependence and technology of other firms. The Kirin series of chips on Huawei smartphones is a prime example.

Further, Huawei started developing home-grown GPUs 8 years ago (2012). However, Huawei's GPU is not for the PC but is primarily designed for Huawei's servers, serving cloud computing tasks and other parts.

Besides smartphone processors, Huawei also has experience in developing AI chip models. In August last year, it unveiled the Ascend 910 and called it the world's best AI processor, at 256 TFLOPS - twice the speed of NVIDIA's Tesla V100 GPU.