With more US doors closing to China what are the supply chain options for its emerging AI champions?
- China’s tech champions took a body check last week after eight of them were added to a US trade blacklist, preventing them from buying US technology
- The companies have shrugged off the move, but ultimately they will have to find domestic alternatives to current US hardware
When a group of leading Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firms flew all the way to Silicon Valley in March 2018 to attend Nvidia’s annual GPU Technology Conference, they were told by the organiser to play down their relations with the US technology giant as growing trade tensions between the United States and China had just erupted into a public war.
Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia is one of the world’s leading makers of graphics chips, known as GPUs, typically used for PC gaming. In recent years the company has also begun to focus on AI and deep learning.
“We were asked to pull press releases that signalled our close cooperation with Nvidia, and we just did it as requested,” a representative from one of China’s leading AI companies who attended the event told the South China Morning Post, asking to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the matter.
“But we all felt a chill at that time, and it is my understanding that many Chinese AI companies began to prepare a plan B when they returned to China after the event,” said the person.
China and the US are vying for supremacy in the AI field, with a number of Chinese companies coming to prominence as they expand outside the domestic market.
However, China’s emerging AI champions took a body check last week after eight of them were added to a US trade blacklist, preventing them from buying American technology, for what Washington has described as human rights violations.
