Chinese companies are ditching Nvidia Corp.’s advanced accelerators in favor of domestic silicon, underscoring how tensions with the US are reshaping the AI infrastructure buildout and propelling Beijing’s ambitions to substitute American technology.
Executives in the country say they’ll allocate 46% of their budget for artificial intelligence accelerators to domestic products over the next 12 months, up from 30% today, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence survey released on Tuesday. In addition, 80% of executives said their total infrastructure spending is running over-budget this year, mostly because of the high cost of AI-related projects.
China’s biggest AI infrastructure builders and their key suppliers — Tencent Holdings Ltd., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Huawei Technologies Co. — are best-positioned to take advantage of the shift. AI accelerators produced by Hygon Information Technology Co. and Cambricon Technologies Corp. were also being evaluated by a large pool of respondents to the survey.
“China’s drive to substitute locally made AI-semiconductors for foreign ones is making progress, which is likely to benefit domestic markers such as Huawei and Hygon,” said the report, which surveyed 60 executives at Chinese software, finance, manufacturing and retail companies.
