HUAWEI, the world’s largest telecom equipment maker, said yesterday that it will sell some servers powered by its own chips for the first time, doubling down on efforts to boost its cloud computing business.

This comes at a time when Huawei, which set up its cloud business unit last year, is trying to gain a firmer foothold in the public cloud market at home that is currently dominated by Alibaba.

Huawei’s semiconductor arm, Hisilicon, already makes some chips the company uses in its smartphones and telecom equipment, but the servers it currently sells to telecom companies and cloud computing clients mostly use Intel chips.

Huawei did not say what percentage of the servers it makes will use its chips.

Its 7 nanometer Ascend 910 chipset, which the firm claims is twice as powerful as its nearest competitor Nvidia’s v100, will be available from the second quarter of 2019.

The Shenzhen-based firm will not sell these chips to third parties, its rotating chairman, Eric Xu, said at the company’s annual global partners’ conference, Huawei Connect.

“Since we do not sell to third parties, there is no direct competition between Huawei and chip vendors,” Xu said yesterday, in response to questions about competition from companies such as Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia.

“We provide hardware and cloud computing service.”

Huawei also unveiled Ascend 310, a chipset for computing on smart devices, which is available right away.

Huawei has been trying to boost its profile in the cloud computing market and has teamed up with Microsoft to offer Microsoft apps on Huawei Cloud.

The push into AI and the cloud marks Huawei’s attempt to build a Chinese technology empire that can compete against the world’s top players.

“Huawei’s AI strategy is built on top of continued investment in basic technologies and talent training,” Xu said.

Huawei is also introducing cloud computing services and dedicated data centers for autonomous vehicles that will run off those chips, delving deeper into territory staked out by Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and homegrown rival Alibaba.

The company’s AI chips underpin that strategic thrust, and align with the government’s intention to build a domestic semiconductor industry that can gradually wean China off foreign imports.

Huawei already designs AI-capable “Kirin” processors for its own smartphones, shipments of which pulled ahead of Apple for the first time in the second quarter of the year. The Kirin line can, among other things, adjust computing resources based on usage.

It’s already by some reckonings the world’s largest provider of networking equipment to wireless carriers, outstripping the likes of Ericsson with growing sales in Europe.

(SD-Agencies)