China’s Huawei puts up US$1.5 billion to attract developers in computing ecosystem push

Having mastered the communications side of the technology world with 5G and smartphones, Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies is committing US$1.5 billion as a first step to master the other side: computing.

“We are more and more aware that the world is composed of two fundamental technologies – connections and computing,” Huawei’s deputy chairman Ken Hu Houkun said in Shenzhen on Wednesday.

“The future of computing is a massive market worth more than two trillion US dollars,” he added, citing Gartner’s five-year forecast.

To tap into that market, over the next five years the company will invest an additional US$1.5 billion in incentives to expand its developer base from 1.3 million to 5 million to enable Huawei and its worldwide partners to come up with the next generation of intelligent applications and solutions.

Hu said part of the investment will be used to establish an ecosystem for its Kunpeng series of server CPU chips which are aimed at meeting the general computing needs of corporate customers. Huawei is developing the Kunpeng ecosystems in several key Chinese cities including Beijing Shanghai and Nanjing, which have huge potential corporate computing markets.

Last month, Huawei unveiled a new high-end artificial intelligence (AI) chip for servers, Ascend 910, designed to grow its share of the booming cloud services market. Huawei claims the device is the “world’s most powerful AI processor” targeted at AI model training, which is crucial to Huawei’s future business growth as it sees AI as a general purpose technology that can be used in almost every sector of the economy.