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One of the world’s largest mobile networks will train its trillion-parameter strong LLM on Huawei’s AI chips as Nvidia, AMD are sidelined

Chinese state-owned carrier China Telecom has announced the development of two LLMs trained entirely on domestically produced chips.

In a statement from the Institute of AI at China Telecom, published on WeChat and reported by the South China Morning Post, its open-source TeleChat2-115B, which has over 100 billion parameters, and a second unnamed model, which reportedly has 1 trillion parameters, were trained using tens of thousands of locally manufactured chips.

The statement claims that this development “indicates that China has truly realized total self-sufficiency in domestic LLM training,” a challenging goal for the country since the US imposed strict export regulations that block access to high-end GPUs like the Nvidia H100 and A100.

Turning to local suppliers

While China Telecom hasn’t specified who supplied the chips used to train its LLMs, it’s likely that Huawei provided the majority, if not all of them. The company has been positioning itself as a domestic alternative to Nvidia, and the South China Morning Post notes that China Telecom “previously disclosed that it is developing LLM technology using Ascend chips developed by the Shenzhen-based telecom equipment giant.”

Huawei has recently begun sending samples of its new Ascend 910C processor to Chinese server and telecom companies for testing, and it has been targeting major Nvidia customers in China in the hopes of getting them to switch at least some of their business.

Although there is a thriving black market in China for Nvidia’s high-end GPUs, many companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, prefer to stay compliant and use lower-spec, permitted GPUs like Nvidia’s H20 to avoid legal and reputational risks and to maintain access to Nvidia’s support. These companies are increasingly turning to Huawei for their AI needs. It was recently reported that TikTok owner ByteDance had put in an order for 100,000 Ascend processors.

The South China Morning Post also reports that, in addition to Huawei, China Telecom is exploring hardware from Cambricon, a local AI chip start-up, to further diversify its chip supply.