Fresh out after beating Apple (AAPL) in global smartphone sales, Huawei Technologies has now revealed two new artificial intelligence chips for data centers and smart devices – a move many claims as a precursor to possibly dethroning Samsung. By unveiling two AI chips, Huawei has taken the chip war to the global level and giving a tough competition to Intel (INTC), Samsung, Qualcomm (QCOM) and Nvidia (NVDA) in one go.
Huawei intends to churn out profitability through the AI chips – Ascend 910 and Ascend 310 – and hopes the strategy will drive growth in the next few years. The chips were unveiled at the Huawei Connect conference held in Shanghai, China. The chips will be made available in the second quarter of 2019.
The company also launched cloud computing services and dedicated data centers for driverless vehicles. Huawei has ventured into the market that has been dominated by Amazon.com (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT) and Alibaba Group (BABA). This comes on the heels of the trade war between the administration of President Donald Trump and China.
Huawei looks to depend on the chips to drive more clients, with the hardware that boasts of processing huge amounts of data at a faster pace than its competitors. The company is establishing new revenue avenues for its enterprise business by selling hardware along with software and services.
The enterprise business accounted for just over 9% of Huawei’s revenues in 2017 and increased about 35% from last year. Huawei is now pushing into AI chips for enterprise as well as consumer applications. Already, the company designs AI-capable processor Kirin for its own smartphones that can adjust computing resources based on usage.
During the end of August, a Gartner report showed that Huawei outstripped Apple to become the No. 2 smartphone vendor in the world, behind Samsung. Huawei, which raised global market share to 13.3% from 9.8% a year ago, has been riding on the success of its Honor lineup and premium model P20 Pro.