BEIJING - Beijing city authorities have announced subsidies for firms that purchase domestically produced artificial intelligence chips, as China seeks to develop its semiconductor industry and reduce reliance on foreign technology.
"Companies that purchase domestically controlled GPU chips for intelligent computing services will receive support based on a certain percentage of their investment," the document showed, referring to chips known as graphics processing units . Achieving self-sufficiency in AI chips, which are essential for training AI models, has become an urgent task for China as the U.S. tightens restrictions on exporting advanced computing products to the country citing national security concerns.
China is cultivating its own AI chip industry in which the Ascend 910 chips of Huawei Technologies are widely seen as a potential alternative to products from U.S. rival Nvidia.