Global ImpactChina risks falling behind in the AI race, but can a cutthroat price war balance the scales?

Name: SenseTime CEO expects Hong Kong-listed firm to turn a profit in 2 years with generative AI business
Uploaded: 2024-06-11T06:00:12.000Z
Duration: 2 min 15 s
Description: SenseTime CEO expects Hong Kong-listed firm to turn a profit in 2 years with generative AI business

In this week’s issue of the Global Impact newsletter, we take a look at the price war that is developing in China as tech firms fight to keep up with the likes of Nvidia.

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Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia. Photo: Bloomberg

Matt Haldane

Published: 2:00pm, 11 Jun 2024

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If ever there was doubt about just how much artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the imagination of investors and the public at large, simply look at the rock-star treatment of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at Computex in Taipei at the start of June.

There he unveiled plans for an annual release cycle of chips that would power generative AI (GenAI), robotics and advanced data centres that he referred to as “AI factories”.

The global excitement around the world’s most valuable semiconductor company has reached a fever pitch, but Huang’s talk may have landed a bit differently across the Taiwan Strait.

Washington’s restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductors to China mean Nvidia’s most advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) cannot be shipped or sold to mainland Chinese companies.

With the new fervent pace of upgrades, China could fall further behind in the AI race even as companies pour resources into keeping up in the realm of GenAI.

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SenseTime CEO expects Hong Kong-listed firm to turn a profit in 2 years with generative AI business

On the software side, Chinese tech giants and start-ups alike are flooding the market with large language models - the tech that undergirds chatbots such as ChatGPT.

With China’s internet services industry largely sandboxed off from the rest of the world, having the most cutting-edge frontier models is less of an issue. Many AI start-ups are building on Meta Platforms’ open-source Llama models, anyway.

Instead, Chinese companies are left competing on the one thing that has ravaged so many tech markets before it: price.

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}In this week’s issue of the Global Impact newsletter, we take a look at the price war that is developing in China as tech firms fight to keep up with the likes of Nvidia.

In this week’s issue of the Global Impact newsletter, we take a look at the price war that is developing in China as tech firms fight to keep up with the likes of Nvidia.