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

"Chinese company Zhipu AI has trained image generation model entirely on Huawei processors, demonstrating that Chinese firms can build competitive AI systems without access to advanced Western 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 full training of a state-of-the-art multimodal image generation model using only Huawei-made processors. The training used Huawei's Ascend Atlas 800T A2 devices and the MindSpore AI framework, covering the entire pipeline from data preprocessing through large-scale training without Western hardware. This represents the first full training cycle of such a multimodal model on Chinese-made chips. US export restrictions that cut Zhipu off from Nvidia H100 and A100 GPUs prompted Chinese firms to pursue domestic chip architectures and software ecosystems to maintain competitiveness in advanced AI development.

Read at Computerworld