Tech war: China eyes supercomputers for building LLMs amid US sanctions on advanced chips

China must find an alternative approach to artificial intelligence (AI) development, in lieu of stacking up processors inside data centres, as US sanctions continue to bar the country’s access to advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment, according to industry experts on the mainland.

Leveraging supercomputing technology that China has developed over the past two decades could help break the stranglehold of US-led restrictions on the mainland’s AI industry, according to Zhang Yunquan, a researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), who was quoted in a report on Monday by state-backed tabloid Global Times.

Supercomputing systems designed for training large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning generative AI services like ChatGPT – are crucial to replacing power-hungry, data-centre computing clusters, which typically employ from 10,000 to 100,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) for such training, Zhang said in a recent conference, according to the report.

China’s quest to establish a viable, advanced computing platform to train LLMs and develop AI applications shows the urgency of becoming technologically self-sufficient on the mainland, as its AI progress remains hindered by limited GPU choices amid US sanctions that have prevented top GPU firm Nvidia from supplying its most cutting-edge chips to the country.

Nvidia is currently working on a version of its new flagship AI chips for the China market that would be compatible with current US export controls, according to a Reuters report last week that cited four sources familiar with the matter.