The owner of TikTok is said to have developed an AI model with Huawei chips

Like the US intensify export controls In China, the owner of TikTok plans to use a homegrown chipmaker for an artificial intelligence model it is developing.

ByteDance plans build an AI model using chips from HuaweiReuters reported, citing three unnamed people familiar with the matter. The company wants to use the Huawei Ascend 910B chips for train the model, people said. ByteDance ordered more than 100,000 Huawei chips, but in July received less than 30,000 of them. The model being developed is expected to be less powerful than ByteDance’s, a person told Reuters Doubao modelwhich was launched last August.

“The whole premise here is wrong,” a ByteDance spokesperson said in a statement to Quartz. “No new AI models are being developed.”

Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company’s Ascend 910B chip is used for the less AI-intensive model deductionthe people told Reuters, but training requires more computing power and therefore more advanced chips. And it seems that Huawei had one it is difficult to increase production the Ascend 910B — China’s best alternative to Nvidia (NVDA) chips that cannot be sold to Chinese customers under US trade restrictions. The chipmaking machines that Huawei uses to produce the advanced chips are designed for older chip generations, The Information reportedand their reuse led to the failure of certain components.

Since the US began implementation of trade restrictions on advanced chips, including those designed by Nvidia, in 2022, ByteDance sought chips from Chinese companies and worked at his own development. ByteDance has designed two chips with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM) that they plan to mass produce by 2026, The Information reported.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is encouraging tech companies to do so buy AI chips from local companiesand become less dependent on Nvidia, Bloomberg reported. Nvidia has developed three AI chips for the Chinese market under export controls, including the H20, which ByteDance has ordered hundreds of thousands of.