Huawei announces world's first AI chips at Huawei Connect

Huawei Connect, a global event for the ICT Industry, marked its third year at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center. The event, which has been a stage for Huawei to release their products and make announcements is themed on AI - Activate Intelligence. This year, it focuses on the challenges, innovations, opportunities, and practices of Artificial Intelligence.

Eric Xu, who is the company's Rotating Chairman, has announced the organization's portfolio which includes the much-hyped AI based chip series named Ascend, which also happens to be world’s first AI IP and chip series designed for a full range of scenarios. With its full-stack AI portfolio, Huawei aims to provide pervasive intelligence to help drive industry development and build a fully connected, intelligent world.

According to the company's predictions, the world will be flooded with almost 40 billion personal smart devices with about ninety percent of the users depending on some kind of digital assistant. AI will be a part of our lives and will be incorporated into everything we use now with data utilization reaching up to the 86% mark.

During the keynote, Eric Xu said, “Huawei’s AI strategy is to invest in basic research and talent development, build a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio, and foster an open global ecosystem.”

“Within Huawei, we will continue exploring ways to improve management and efficiency with AI. In the telecom sector, we will adopt SoftCOM AI to make network O&M more efficient. In the consumer market, HiAI will bring true intelligence to our consumer devices, making them smarter than ever. Our Huawei EI public cloud services and FusionMind private cloud solutions will provide abundant and affordable computing power for all organizations – especially businesses and governments – and help them use AI with greater ease. Our portfolio will also include an AI acceleration card, AI server, AI appliance, and many other products.”, said Eric Xu explaining the reasons behind the companies thought process.

As the keynote progressed, the company today unveiled the Ascend AI IP and chip series, which also happens to be the world's first AI IP and chip series that natively serves all scenarios, providing optimal TeraOPS per watt. The company expects that their unified architecture will make it easy to deploy, migrate and interconnect AI across various fields and scenarios. The Ascent 910 and Ascend 310 chips will work at the bottom level of the stack, enabling the adoption of AI across all industries.

The full stack AI portfolio also includes various products such as:

Application enablement: Which offers full pipeline services (ModelArts), hierarchical APIs, and pre-integrated solutions

CANN (Compute Architecture for Neural Networks): A chip operators library and highly automated operators development toolkit

MindSpore: A unified training and inference framework for device, edge, and cloud (both standalone and cooperative)

Last year, the company introduced their AI based cloud solution, developed specially for enterprises and governments, called Cloud El. Earlier this year, they announced HiAl, which is an AI-based engine developed for smart devices. The full-stack, all scenario AI portfolio helps integrates all these services making it even more powerful.