SenseTime Builds Largest Supercomputing Center in Asia; Kaifu Lee-Led AI Manufacturing Startup Goes Public; AMD Receives China Clearance for Xilinx Acquisition

China’s AI news in the week of January 30, 2022

SenseTime Opens Largest AI Data Center of Asia

Chinese AI giant SenseTime last week proclaimed its next-generation Artificial Intelligence Data Center (AIDC) in Shanghai has begun operation. The first phase of SenseTime AIDC can provide up to 3.74 exaFLOPS of computing capacity, making it one of Asia’s largest data centers for AI computation.

AIDC is built to help SenseTime better train and inference its massive AI models, from facial recognition programs to sensing capabilities for smart vehicles. For example, SenseTime INTERN, a general-purpose computer vision framework that can perform classification, target detection, segmentation, and depth estimation, was trained on AIDC. With only 10% of training data in the target domains used, INTERN outperforms state-of-the-art models trained with the whole set by a significant margin.

SenseTime AIDC occupies an area of 80 acres with constructions taking up to 130,000 square meters. SenseTime has invested RMB5.6 billion yuan in the first phase of AIDC, the Chinese media reported. The completion of the second phase will scale the total computing capacity to approximately 7.5 exaFLOPS.

The increasing demand for computing has obligated AI companies to pile up computing clusters. AI doubles compute every 3.5 months, according to a 2018 OpenAI research. This momentum has been exponentially accelerating in the past two years due to the rise of so-called large-scale language models. For instance, the training of GPT-3 takes 1024 A100 GPUs for 34 days.

The previously largest AI cluster in China is Peng Cheng Cloud Brain II jointly developed by Huawei and Shenzhen-based Peng Cheng Laboratory. Recently Facebook, now Meta, also announced their supercomputer AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), which will be the fastest in the world once fully built out in mid-2022.

Leading AI Manufacturing Company AInnovation Tech Goes Public in Hong Kong

AInnovation Tech, a Qingdao-based AI startup incubated backed by Sinovation Ventures and backed by SoftBank, made its public debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange last week, opening at HK$26.30. The public offering will help the company raise HK$1.18 billion ($151 million).

Founded in 2018, AInnovation Tech offers AI-powered enterprise solutions to help clients transform their business in manufacturing, finance, and other industries. For example, its proprietary machine vision inspection software system can locate, measure, detect, and recognize common defects or key metrics.

AInnovation Tech has generated revenue of RMB462 million yuan in 2020 and RMB553 million yuan in the first nine months of 2021, with an adjusted net loss of RMB86.6 million and RMB81.0 million respectively. The company said in its prospectus that in 2020, the company was the third-largest AI technology-driven solution provider in the enterprise AI solutions market in China in terms of revenue with a 0.3% market share.

The chairman of AInnovation Tech is Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, the founding director of Microsoft Research Asia and former president of Google China. Said Dr. Lee in his opinion piece on TIME, “Chinese traditional industries are confronting rising labor costs thanks to a declining working population and slowing population growth. The answer is AI, which reduces operational costs, enhances efficiency and productivity, and generates revenue growth.”

China Approves AMD’s 35B Deal on Xilinx With Conditions

Chinese regulators have nodded over AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx, the world’s top FPGA developer, clearing the last major regulatory hurdle for the $35-billion deal. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.

The Anti-Monopoly Policy Bureau of the State Administration for Market Regulation of the People’s Republic of China also imposed extra conditions on the approval. One key condition, which sounds fair, bars any forced bundle sales between AMD CPUs and Xilinx FPGAs, allowing clients to buy into one or the other individually, without discrimination.

FPGA, or Field Programmable Gate Array, is a critical semiconductor component for industries like 5G, data centers, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and more. Xilinx held about 50%-55% share of the FPGA market in 2020.

The green light from Chinese regulators comes as good news for AMD, despite the souring US-China relationship. The company is heavily dependent on the Chinese market, which generates more revenue than the U.S. Many Chinese industry analysts argued the approval is well-anticipated since it will by no means change the global FPGA landscape or impact on FPGA supply chains in China. Intel also accounted for about 30 percent of the market share after its acquisition of Altera in 2015.

China last month approved SK Hynix to take over Intel NAND business but rejected Qualcomm’s $44 billion deal to acquire NXP in 2018. Also in the last week, AMD’s GPU rival NVIDIA is abandoning its acquisition of ARM after seeing strong resistance from Chinese, European Union, and U.S. regulators Bloomberg reports.

Investment News:

• Baidu’s intelligent electric vehicle arm JIDU has closed Series A financing, raising nearly $400 million. Founded in 2021 in Beijing, JIDU plans to unveil its first Robocar concept car at the Beijing Auto Show in April this year, with a mass-produced model set to be launched in 2023.
• Fourier Intelligence, an exoskeleton robotic developer, has raised RMB400 million yuan in its Series D funding round. Founded in 2015, the Shanghai-based company provides upper-limb rehab robotics and lower-limb exoskeleton robot, which can help the disabled go beyond their physical limits, stand up and walk again.
• WITINMEM, a low-power AI chip and system solution provider, has raised RMB200 million yuan in its Series B funding round. Founded in 2017, the company develops the processing-in-memory technology in NOR Flash memory.