Primary Taiwanese news agency Central News Agency (CNA) recently reported that, affected by the U.S. chip export ban, Chinese technology companies have reported chip shortages leading to insufficient computing power. These companies are restricting artificial intelligence (AI) related services. This reliance on chip imports may put China’s technology industry at a disadvantage in the AI competition. China’s semiconductor industry may have found a way to produce advanced chips for 5G smartphones, but it has yet to make chips powerful enough to run AI applications. For example, in order to avoid insufficient computing power, China’s short video and live broadcast platform Kwai had to limit the number of users to test its text-generated video model Kling. Kwai uses Nvidia’s A800 chips to train it AI models. AI startup Moonshot that was recently valued at US$3 billion, also warned its users of their popular chatbot that their computing power may be insufficient during peak hours. Companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance that offer large-scale language model applications are telling their enterprise customers who need heavy use to wait in line. All above-mentioned companies declined to comment on this matter.
Source: CNA, June 28, 2024
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/aopl/202406280418.aspx