The number of powerful chips coming out of China keeps growing as a war of words on semiconductors with the U. S. escalates.
A joint venture between Qualcomm and China’s Guizhou province, called Huaxintong Semiconductor Technology, has started the development of a new server chip based on ARM technology.
The joint venture is “now busy developing a customized server CPU product based on our technology and designs for the China market,” said Derek Aberle, president at Qualcomm, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of an earnings call last week.
Other companies are also developing custom chips for the Chinese server market.
Suzhou PowerCore is developing a CPU based on IBM’s Power architecture, though the venture has raised security concerns. AMD has also created a joint venture to create Chinese x86 server chips.
Chipmakers are making a run at the Chinese market, which is considered a big opportunity for data center technologies. Like Facebook and Google in the U. S., Chinese companies like Alibaba and Tencent are establishing mega data centers for cloud and machine-learning services.
But the Chinese market has its quirks because companies there prefer to buy hardware from local vendors. It’s partly because servers made by Chinese companies are cheaper and potentially come with fewer national security risks.
China’s long-term goal is to be self reliant in the hardware market, with a majority of devices in the country running on homegrown components. The country already has the world’s fastest supercomputer, TaihuLight.
