Tencent unveiled its progress in chips for the primary time this week, which instantly gave its inventory worth a modest boost. Silicon appears distant from the large’s primary arenas of video video games and social networks, so observers recommend that Tencent’s transfer is to sign that it’s aligned with China’s long-run targets to self-develop semiconductors at a time its gaming unit is below a slate of regulatory assaults. Different main tech powerhouses, from Alibaba, Baidu, to Huawei, have all answered Beijing’s silicon push with their in-house chips.
Alternatively, for an organization with as a lot knowledge to deal with as Tencent, one ought to marvel why it didn’t get in on semiconductors earlier.
The three chips Tencent unveiled on Wednesday are all customized constructed: one for AI inference, one for video transcoding, and one other for community interface.
There have been ample examples the place web behemoths begin constructing their very own specialised {hardware} to buttress their current companies. Back in 2018, Fb was already hiring AI chip designers, who may probably assist deal with misinformation and course of its gargantuan quantity of person knowledge.
Tencent, with over one billion month-to-month customers on its flagship WeChat messenger, absolutely has a variety of digital footprints to deal with.
However WeChat’s steward Allen Zhang is famously reserved about exploiting private knowledge. Until now, WeChat’s person feed continues to be stored chronological with native adverts that sporadically pop up.
“If we analyze [users’ chat history], we are able to convey nice promoting income to the corporate. However we don’t do this, so WeChat cares quite a bit about person privateness,” Zhang said at WeChat’s annual convention final yr. He desires WeChat to be a helpful, disposable software reasonably than an app that soaks up folks’s time with addictive, algorithmic suggestions.
However Zhang appears to have made concessions. WeChat now features a quick video part with the barebone features of TikTok. Like TikTok, WeChat’s video characteristic infers what customers like and serves up content material accordingly.
Tencent has a slew of different enterprise traces that would profit from larger machine studying energy and are maybe extra wanting to monetize: Tencent Information, its information aggregator, and Tencent Video, its Netflix equal. Beneath China’s strict censorship surroundings, content material suppliers can also discover themselves in want of extra computing energy to root out textual content, audio and movies that violate authorities guidelines.
Dowson Tong, Tencent’s senior vp, defined that the agency’s AI inference chip shall be used for picture and video processing, pure language processing, search, amongst different situations. The chip for video transcoding, because the identify implies, will guarantee smoothness and low latency as Tencent handles its large video workload. Lastly, the sensible community interface card (SmartNIC) shall be used for CPU server offloads, in accordance with Tong.
Tencent received’t be engaged on chips alone. Tong famous in his speech that the corporate will create an ecosystem to keep up “deep, strategic collaborations with chip home and abroad chip firms.” As an example, Tencent has backed Shanghai-based Enflame, which makes a speciality of AI coaching chips, in 4 funding rounds and is already applying the startup’s tech to its business.
