Chinese AI firm trains state-of-the-art model entirely on Huawei chips

"The model, released on Tuesday, marks the first time a state-of-the-art multimodal model completed its full training cycle on Chinese-made chips, Zhipu said in a statement. The Beijing-based company trained the model on Huawei's Ascend Atlas 800T A2 devices using the MindSpore AI framework, completing the entire pipeline from data preprocessing through large-scale training without relying on Western hardware."

"The achievement carries strategic significance for Zhipu, which the US Commerce Department last year added to a list of entities acting contrary to US national security or foreign policy interests over its alleged ties to China's military. The designation effectively cut the company off from Nvidia's H100 and A100 GPUs, which have become standard for training advanced AI models, forcing Chinese firms to develop alternatives around domestic chip architectures."

Zhipu AI completed end-to-end training of a state-of-the-art multimodal image-generation model using only Chinese-made hardware and software. The training ran on Huawei's Ascend Atlas 800T A2 devices with the MindSpore AI framework, covering data preprocessing through large-scale model training without Western GPUs. This represents the first full training cycle of a comparable multimodal model on domestic chips. The effort gained strategic importance after US export restrictions cut Zhipu off from Nvidia H100 and A100 GPUs, prompting Chinese firms to pursue domestic chip architectures and software stacks to maintain competitiveness in advanced AI development.

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