Chinese technology companies such as Lenovo and ZTE are increasing their investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure to meet the surge in demand for new applications such as ChatGPT and its equivalents in China.
Lenovo, China’s largest PC maker, is seeking a “second growth engine” covering cloud, data center, services and mobile businesses, chairman Yang Yuanqing said this week.
The company’s non-PC business now accounts for 40% of total revenue, up from 31% three years ago. According to Lenovo, the company plans to increase this percentage by 2% again this year.
We focus on the opportunities of the digital economy and generative AI.
Ti Gon
Yang Yuanqing, chairman of Lenovo, China’s largest PC maker
ZTE, China’s largest public telecommunications equipment manufacturer, also aims to explore business opportunities in AI servers. The company’s next-generation smart computing center infrastructure products fully support large-scale model training and inference to support ChatGPT and other AI applications. It also includes a high-performance AI server and a high-performance switch.
Shenzhen-listed ZTE closed at 37 yuan ($5.36) on Friday after a 10% daily cap hike as investors welcomed business expansion.
Chinese dotcom giants are accelerating generative AI services, driving demand for AI computing capabilities and related infrastructure. Currently, China’s AI infrastructure and capabilities are inadequate compared to the United States.
A US technology ban targeting NVIDIA’s advanced graphics cards for AI training will force China to prepare for even more in-house developed AI capabilities.
Alibaba has launched an invite-only test of Tongyi Qianwen, a ChatGPT-like service. This means “understanding with 1000 questions” over the weekend. This follows the debut of Baidu’s ERNIE Bot in March. Both Chinese-developed AI services mainly support Chinese, according to Shanghai Daily tests.
Prior to that, due to its limited computing capabilities, many users spent a lot of time in waiting lists to access Baidu services since its debut in March. That’s why Alibaba is adopting invite-only mode, industry insiders said.
HK-listed SenseTime will present information on its generative AI tools at a conference in Shanghai on Monday.
MOSS, a ChatGPT-like AI bot developed by Fudan University, will also be open source this month.
