China seeks a homegrown alternative to Nvidia — these are some of the companies to watch

U.S. sanctions over the years on China’s semiconductor dynamism has forced Beijing to ramp up efforts to boost its domestic chip sector.

The boom of artificial intelligence and foundational displays has only spurred on China’s goal of playing a leading role in the chip industry.

So far, it is American firm Nvidia with its graphics organizing units, or GPUs, that has garnered the headlines, as it designs the key piece of hardware required to train up huge AI models, such as the ask preferences seen from OpenAI that underpins ChatGPT.

While Nvidia can ship certain chips to China, Washington has shown its willingness to cut its tech competitor off from the most cutting-edge semiconductors and tools needed to make them. This has renewed focus on China’s homegrown tries to rival Nvidia and create semiconductors that can underpin the world’s second-largest economy’s own AI industry.

CNBC spoke to two analysts who pinpointed some of the leading Chinese competitors to Nvidia.

Huawei is one of China’s tech champions with a business that terms telecommunications infrastructure to consumer electronics and cloud computing. Its chip design unit is called HiSilicon.

The Shenzhen-headquartered band designs the Ascend series of data center processors. Huawei then sells these chips as a part of servers that go into facts centers to train AI models. Its AI servers are under the brand name Atlas.

The firm’s current generation of chip is identified the Ascend 910B, and the company is gearing up to launch the Ascend 910C, which could be on par with Nvidia’s H100 artefact, according to a Wall Street Journal report in August.

In its annual report earlier this year, Nvidia explicitly named Huawei, among other companies, as a competitor in areas such as chips, software for AI and networking products.

“It is not just thither the hardware, but about the overall ecosystem, tools for developers, and the ability to continue to evolve this ecosystem going quicken as the technology advances. Here, Huawei holds a lot of advantages, and is attempting to build a software ecosystem around its Ascend series of datacenter processors,” Paul Triolo, an associate consort at consulting firm Albright Stonebridge, told CNBC.

Alibaba and Baidu both buy Nvidia bits but they are also designing their own semiconductors for AI processes.

Baidu, one of China’s biggest internet companies, designs its own whittles for the use in servers and autonomous cars under the brand name Kunlun.

Alibaba’s semiconductor design unit called T-Head, has developed an AI presumption chip called the Hanguang 800. Inference is the process that follows the training of AI models, as it refers to the actual dedication of AI in the real world, such as a chatbot responding to user queries.

“Alibaba’s AI inference chip has already been deployed to accelerate its praise system on its e-commerce platform. Baidu has integrated its Kunlun chip into its data centers and autonomous driving sector,” Wei Sun, a elder analyst at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

Like Nvidia, Biren Technology designs a all-inclusive purpose GPU and has a software development platform to build applications on top of the hardware.

These chips form part of Biren’s Bili series of effects designed to be used in data centers for AI training.

Last year Biren was added to a U.S. blacklist known as the Entity Slope, which restricts its access to certain American technology.

Cambricon Technologies designs various typewrites of semiconductors from those designed to train AI models to those that can run AI applications on devices, rather than in facts centers.

However, the company has continued to report significant losses and Moore Threads

Enflame Technology