In a bid to lower its reliance on Nvidia's hardware for artificial intelligence applications, Chinese cloud giant Baidu acquired hundreds of servers based on Huawei's HiSilicon Ascend 910B processors, reports Reuters citing sources with knowledge of the matter. These application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) were developed to compete against Nvidia's A100 AI and HPC GPUs, but many would consider them outdated.
In total, Baidu ordered 200 servers running 1600 Ascend 910B processors in August, demonstrating that Baidu is serious about using Huawei's technology on a large scale. Huawei's Ascend 910B is meant to compete with Nvidia's A100-based offerings that are used primarily for inference, and Baidu's order is a big vote of confidence for Huawei. By October, Huawei had already delivered about 1,000 of the processors, proving it can handle relatively big orders pretty quickly despite restrictions by the U.S. government.
