On August 23, Huawei hosted a press conference on artificial intelligence at its headquarters in Shenzhen. Eric Xu, the current chairman of the company, opened the event with the words: "Since we announced our AI strategy in October last year, we have been making steady progress. With the launch of the Ascend 910 and MindSpore, all the key components of our AI portfolio are now in place."

The Ascend 910 is currently said to be the world's most powerful AI processor. It achieves 256 TeraFLOPS for floating point operations with half precision (FP16) and 512 TeraOPS for full precision calculations (INT8). "Despite its unbeatable performance, the Ascend only consumes a maximum of 310 watts, which is well below the advertised consumption values of 350 watts," says Xu. The main purpose of the processor, which is manufactured by Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC and will only ever be available for purchase integrated into one of Huawei's Atlas computing systems rather than on its own, is AI model training. In a typical training session based on ResNet-50 (artificial neural network), the combination of the Ascend 910 and the equally new AI computing framework MindSpore leads to a doubling of the training speed compared to conventional accelerator cards using TensorFlow, the widely used AI framework from Google.

MindSpore can be used consistently on all supported end devices in both edge and cloud environments. The data centers for the cloud services will be located in Hong Kong and Singapore. "In a typical neural network for natural language processing, MindSpore has 20% fewer core lines of code than the leading frameworks on the market and helps developers to increase their efficiency by at least 50%," promises Xu. In addition to Ascend processors, the framework also supports GPUs, CPUs and other processor types. With the aim of driving the spread of AI in a wide range of industries and markets, MindSpore will also be available as an open source version in the first quarter of 2020. Last but not least, Huawei wants to help create an open AI ecosystem around its own AI framework. In general, Xu believes that artificial intelligence is still at an early stage of development and that there are still a number of gaps to be closed before AI can become a truly general-purpose technology. To ensure the protection of user data, MindSpore will not process any data itself, but will only work with historical and model data that has already been pre-processed. The framework also has integrated technology to protect the model.

The Chinese company presented its first commercial AI SoC (System on a Chip) in the Ascend Mini series, the Ascend 310, at the 'Huawei Connect 2018' conference last year. With a maximum consumption of 8 watts, this processor achieves 16 TeraOPS with integer precision (INT8) and 8 TeraFLOPS with half precision (FP16), making it the most powerful AI SoC for edge computing according to Huawei. The Ascend 310 also enables the use of Huawei's cloud services such as image analysis, optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent video analysis. More than 50 APIs are already available for these services. The number of API calls per day has now exceeded the 100 million mark and is expected to rise to 300 million by the end of 2019.