Huawei upbeat on AI strategy for India; no word on 5G roll-out plans yet

Global telecom giant Huawei will continue to go ahead with its India strategy related to artificial intelligence technology as planned, unfazed by the pressure tactics by America through ban and escalating US-China trade war.

However, it maintained silence on 5G roll-out plans in the country.

"As for our AI (artificial intelligence) strategy in India, it's no different from our overall strategy. We are going to develop Atlas card and servers based on the standard processors, and we are also going to work on MDC (mobile data centre) based on standard processes as well," Huawei Rotating Chairman Eric Xu said.

Xu was responding to a question on what will be the company's India strategy following the looming uncertainty over 5G roll-out, at the launch of its AI processor Ascend 910 and AI computing framework MindSpore in Shenzhen recently.

The Chinese telecom equipment maker has caught itself in a bitter battle with the US, which has provided a 90-day reprieve to continue doing business as usual with the US suppliers. The US imposed the ban on the company over concerns of security.

Washington has also been putting pressure on other countries to restrict operations of the Chinese telecom firm.

Restricting the replies around the company's AI plans, Xu said, "Our AI strategy is not necessarily tied to 5G. For, you see, 5G is 5G and AI is AI."

Elaborating on the AI strategy for India, Xu said the AI products can be provided to universities, partners and enterprises in the country as they address industry-specific issues and challenges.

Similarly, training and cloud services are also based on standard processors, which can be made available in the Indian market. Universities, research organisations and enterprises can use these AI cloud services for their research in application development needs, to address requirements and challenges of various industry verticals, he said at the launch.

"It ensures we are going to provide personal services and work together and be partners. So, we are taking different industry verticals, aiming to serve them and have them be more efficient so that we together can work towards the development of the society," Xu said.

"The company will continue investing in AI processors to deliver more abundant, affordable and adaptable computing power that meets the needs of a broad range of scenarios (e.g, edge computing, on vehicle computing for autonomous driving and training)," Xu said.

MindSpore AI computing framework supports all development for AI applications in all scenarios, the company said.

"MindSpore marks significant progress towards these goals. As privacy protection grows more important than ever, support for all scenarios is essential for enabling secure, pervasive AI. This is a key component in the MindSpore framework, which can readily adapt to different deployment needs," the company had said at the launch.