At the World AI Conference that opened in Shanghai on Saturday, Huawei emerged as China’s best hope for driving a domestic hardware sector for advanced artificial intelligence workloads. There, Huawei debuted its CloudMatrix 384 AI system, powered by 384 of its high-performance processors, the Ascend 910C GPUs. The setup has drawn favorable comparisons to Nvidia’s flagship supercomputing platform, the GB200 NVL72, a rack-scale solution for on-site AI and HPC tasks. Huawei’s new hardware reportedly drew large crowds to its booth, but the company declined to share detailed comments or live benchmarks, suggesting a tightly controlled public presentation. Continue reading Huawei May Challenge Nvidia with Its CloudMatrix AI System

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) says it will increase production capacity by up to 47 percent for 2022 as demand continues to surge amid a global chip shortage. To support the increase and technology upgrades, the world’s largest contract chipmaker plans to set a company record for capital expenditure in 2022, with spending at $40-44 billion (compared to $30 billion in 2021). Speaking at an investor conference, company CFO Wendell Huang said about 70-80 percent of the 2022 capex will fund development of advanced 2nm, 3nm, 5nm and 7nm processors as TSMC fights to maintain its dominant market share while rivals step up. Continue reading TSMC Earmarks Up to $44 Billion in Competitive Chip Sector