Huawei executives and government officials jointly launch the Kunpeng Industrial Ecosystem Center in Shanghai's Xuhui district on Thursday. Photo: Wang Jiamei/GT

Chinese technology giant Huawei Technologies Co and the Shanghai municipal government on Thursday launched the Kunpeng Industrial Ecosystem Innovation Center in the city's Xuhui district.

The move marks Huawei's latest effort in fostering an industry ecosystem for its Kunpeng-based platform for both software and hardware development.

The internet industry in China has been growing fast, producing vast volumes of data. Processing that much data requires computing power to increase at the same pace. Based on these needs, Huawei has developed the Kunpeng chips and Ascend chips.

"But hardware alone is not enough for improving computing power," Jin Yaohui, chief engineer of the Artificial Intelligence Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, told the Global Times on Thursday. "We must also speak the language chips can understand, which is one of the difficulties for computing development. This is why Huawei needs to have many developers to use its platform together."

Huawei plans to invest 3 billion yuan ($436 million) in the coming five years to foster an industry ecosystem and expand its reach to 1 million developers, Lu Yong, president of Huawei China, said at the Huawei Intelligent Computing Congress 2019 on Thursday.

The Huawai event is a forum associated with the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference.

"It is a question whether the rapid development of China's internet sector or artificial intelligence (AI) sector is built on sand or has a solid foundation," Lu noted. "Therefore, the diversity of computing platforms is essential, which can offer more guarantees for clients' business in terms of safety, continuity and sustainable development."

"The idea of diversity or giving clients more choice is good," Jin said. "At present, Intel's servers account for 99 percent of the market share in the industry, and from the perspective of a customer, one more choice is better."

"I saw many different AI application scenarios today, but I also know that there is still a gap between China's best output and world leaders in terms of computing power and algorithms," a programmer surnamed Chen told the Global Times on Thursday. "China's AI development cannot rely on Huawei alone. A complete ecosystem needs to be formed, and more companies need to join the ecosystem to make it complete."

Huawei's ecosystem ambition has earned it support from the Shanghai municipal government, which is striving to develop the city into a leading AI hub in China and around the world.

"By launching the Kunpeng ecosystem center, we are aiming to make full use of Huawei's leading technological strength and its integrated industrial ecosystem chain to pool talent and companies from China and overseas," Fang Shizhong, director of Xuhui district, noted at the Huawei Intelligent Computing Congress 2019.


Newspaper headline: Huawei opens Shanghai center for innovation