He continued: “Huawei is using its customer service capabilities to work more closely with customers in using its chips, which will help them counter Nvidia’s advantage with its software ecosystem in the long term.”
Additionally, Nguyen said, “export controls will continue to provide Huawei with competitive opportunities because they prevent Nvidia from selling the ‘best’ version of its products in China.”
In his report, FT said Huawei had sent its engineers to customer sites to help them transfer their training code, written in Cuda, to Huawei’s Cann.
Thomas Randall, director of artificial intelligence market research at Info-Tech Research Group, said: “China is certainly striving to become self-sufficient in advanced chip manufacturing. However, Huawei is struggling with efficiency in expanding production of its processing hardware, which was originally designed to replace Nvidia’s processors.”
The low yield of its processors, he said, “means that advanced chip manufacturing will remain commercially unviable. This does not mean that Huawei is in trouble, as the company has improved its market share in China – it is simply facing a time crunch to improve its competitiveness.”