TECH NEWS – The Chinese tech giant aims to cut its reliance on Western companies by moving away from HBM (high-bandwidth memory).

Looking at China’s AI hardware development, it becomes clear that the absence of advanced HBM solutions has been a bottleneck. While Chinese firms such as CXMT have made significant strides, there is still a gap between Western and domestic memory solutions. According to Chinese press reports, Huawei is allegedly working on a dedicated AI memory solution in the form of a solid-state drive tailored for data centers.

Although the details remain undisclosed, Huawei’s effort is said to reduce the domestic industry’s dependency on HBM, whose supply has been heavily restricted by geopolitical factors. Reports suggest that Huawei’s AI SSD will not face capacity limitations and will significantly boost computing power. However, since no implementation details have been revealed, these claims should be treated with caution for now.

In the field of AI memory storage, Huawei has also introduced a Unified Cache Manager (UCM) software package designed to accelerate LLM training across HBM, standard DRAM, and SSDs. This enables the company to expand memory utilization for AI-related workloads without introducing new hardware, potentially easing restrictions tied to HBM. It shows Huawei’s ongoing attempts to find workarounds for limitations, with the AI SSD emerging as its next strategic target.

Huawei has rapidly expanded its AI computing arsenal for both inference and hardware training. Although still lagging behind competitors like Nvidia, the company’s ongoing efforts are closing the gap. The push away from Western reliance is far from accidental: sanctions affecting China and its tech sector make acquiring AMD and Nvidia technologies increasingly difficult, while the U.S. government has imposed an additional 15% levy on sales from these companies to China.

Source: WCCFTech, Sina