More Chinese AI infrastructure and capabilities in pipeline

Chinese tech firms, including Lenovo and ZTE, are increasing investment in artificial intelligence infrastructures to meet the surging demand for new applications like ChatGPT and its equivalent services in China.

Lenovo, China's biggest personal computer maker, is seeking a "second growth engine" covering cloud, data center, service and mobile businesses, chairman Yang Yuanqing said this week.

The company's non-PC business now accounts for 40 percent of its total revenue, compared with 31 percent three years ago. The company will continue to increase the portion by two percentage points this year, said Lenovo.

It is eyeing the digital economy and generative AI opportunities.

Ti Gong

ZTE, China's biggest public telecommunications gear maker, also aims to explore business opportunities on AI servers. The company's next-generation smart computing center infrastructure products will fully support large model training and inference, supporting ChatGPT and other AI applications. They also include high-performance AI servers and high-performance switches.

Shenzhen-listed ZTE jumped 10 percent daily cap to close at 37 yuan (US$5.36) on Friday, as investors welcomed the business expansion.

Chinese dot-com giants are speeding up generative AI services, which fuels demands for AI computing capabilities and related infrastructures. At present there are insufficient AI infrastructures and capabilities in China compared those in the United States.

The US tech bans, covering NVIDIA's advanced graphic cards for AI training, also force China to prepare more in-house developed AI capabilities.

Alibaba started invited-only tests for its ChatGPT-like services Tongyi Qianwen, meaning "understanding through one thousand questions" over the weekend. It followed Baidu's ERNIE Bot debut in March. Both China-developed AI services mainly support Chinese languages, according to Shanghai Daily's tests.

Before that, many users spent a lot of time on the waiting list to access the Baidu services since its debut in March, because of the limited computing capabilities. That's the reason why Alibaba takes the invite-only mode, industry officials said.

HK-listed SenseTime will release information of its generative AI tools in a conference to be held in Shanghai on Monday.

MOSS, a ChatGPT-like AI bot developed by Fudan University, will also be open source this month.