Cyberport may add some graphics processing units (GPUs) made in China to its Artificial Intelligence Supercomputing Centre in Hong Kong, as the government-run incubator seeks to reduce its reliance on Nvidia chips amid worsening China-US relations, its chief executive said.
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Cyberport has bought four GPUs made by four different mainland Chinese chipmakers and has been testing them at its AI lab to gauge which ones to adopt in the expanding facilities, Rocky Cheng Chung-ngam said in an interview with the Post on Friday. The park has been weighing the use of Chinese GPUs since it first began installing Nvidia chips last year, he said.
“At that time, China-US relations were already quite strained, so relying solely on [Nvidia] was no longer an option,” Cheng said. “That is why we felt that for any new procurement, we should in any case include some from the mainland.”
Cyberport’s AI supercomputing centre, established in December with its first phase offering 1,300 petaflops of computing power, will deliver another 1,700 petaflops by the end of this year, with all 3,000 petaflops currently relying on Nvidia’s H800 chips, he added.
As all four Chinese solutions offer similar performance, Cyberport would take cost into account when determining which ones to order, according to Cheng, declining to name the suppliers.
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