Tencent unveiled its progress in chips for the primary time this week, which instantly gave its inventory worth a modest increase. Silicon appears distant from the enormous’s principal arenas of video video games and social networks, so observers counsel that Tencent’s transfer is to sign that it’s aligned with China’s long-run targets to self-develop semiconductors at a time its gaming unit is beneath a slate of regulatory assaults. Different main tech powerhouses, from Alibaba, Baidu, to Huawei, have all answered Beijing’s silicon push with their in-house chips.
Alternatively, for an organization with as a lot knowledge to deal with as Tencent, one ought to marvel why it didn’t get in on semiconductors earlier.
The three chips Tencent unveiled on Wednesday are all customized constructed: one for AI inference, one for video transcoding, and one other for community interface.
There have been ample examples the place web behemoths begin constructing their very own specialised {hardware} to buttress their current companies. Again in 2018, Fb was already hiring AI chip designers, who might probably assist deal with misinformation and course of its gargantuan quantity of person knowledge.
Tencent, with over one billion month-to-month customers on its flagship WeChat messenger, absolutely has quite a lot of digital footprints to deal with.
However WeChat’s steward Allen Zhang is famously reserved about exploiting private knowledge. Until now, WeChat’s person feed continues to be saved chronological with native advertisements that sporadically pop up.
“If we analyze [users’ chat history], we will carry nice promoting income to the corporate. However we don’t try this, so WeChat cares lots about person privateness,” Zhang mentioned at WeChat’s annual convention final 12 months. He needs WeChat to be a helpful, disposable device moderately than an app that soaks up folks’s time with addictive, algorithmic suggestions.
However Zhang appears to have made concessions. WeChat now features a quick video part with the barebone capabilities of TikTok. Like TikTok, WeChat’s video characteristic infers what customers like and serves up content material accordingly.
Tencent has a slew of different enterprise strains that might profit from larger machine studying energy and are maybe extra wanting to monetize: Tencent Information, its information aggregator, and Tencent Video, its Netflix equal. Underneath China’s strict censorship surroundings, content material suppliers may additionally discover themselves in want of extra computing energy to root out textual content, audio and movies that violate authorities guidelines.
Dowson Tong, Tencent’s senior vp, defined that the agency’s AI inference chip will probably be used for picture and video processing, pure language processing, search, amongst different eventualities. The chip for video transcoding, because the identify implies, will guarantee smoothness and low latency as Tencent handles its large video workload. Lastly, the sensible community interface card (SmartNIC) will probably be used for CPU server offloads, in keeping with Tong.