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| Tencent's involvement in the development of semiconductors |
Tencent unveiled its first chip at the company's annual Cloud Summit, signifying a year of chip design experience as the Chinese tech giant strives to transcend the world of digital entertainment.
All three Tencent chips are custom-made, and products include AI search and recommendation chips, video compression chips, and network chips for cloud servers.
The company said chipsets are an important part of industrial internet devices and infrastructure. As part of its entry into enterprise software, the company has pledged $3 billion in resources over the next three years to help its cloud business partners.
Silicon seems far from the company's main gaming and social networking areas.
Hence, the company's decision appears to be in line with China's long-term semiconductor development goals.
The government has made technological self-sufficiency a top priority in the country. He has invested billions of dollars in government money. He also introduced a wide range of supportive policies to help local companies overcome US sanctions against the semiconductor industry.
From Alibaba to Baidu to Huawei, other tech giants have responded to Beijing's demand for silicon with their own in-house chips.
And the company will not work on the chip only. On the contrary, it has established an ecosystem that maintains a deep strategic cooperation with domestic and foreign chip companies.
Tencent set up its chip division in 2020 and has invested in local startups like Enflame that focus on AI training chips.
The company stated that its AI inference chips are used in scenarios such as image and video processing, natural language processing and search.
The video transcoding chip ensures that the business runs smoothly and at a low cost despite the massive video workloads. A Smart Network Interface Card (SmartNIC) is used to uninstall the server's CPU.
Tencent's entry into the chip business is not surprising
There are many examples of internet giants starting to create their own materials to help their existing businesses.
In 2018, Facebook is hiring designers for artificial intelligence chips to help deal with misinformation and massive user data.