China AI startup Cambricon Technologies aims to capture a 30% share of the China market for AI chips within three years, expecting more than one billion devices to adopt AI processors supplied by the company, including Huawei's new flagship smartphones, according to company sources.

At the Embedded AI Technology Forum held in Beijing November 3, Chen Yunqi, co-founder and chief scientist at Cambricon, said that Huawei's Mate 10 features Kirin 970 processor supporting AI functions and its next flagship model P11 will also adopt Kirin 970 with upgrades. Huawei's move for AI will create great momentum for the AI market and in turn boost Cambricon's business, he added.

Chen said that AI has become the core of the application loads on various computing platforms whether for supercomputers, datacenters, smartphones or embedded systems, and the core of the AI technology is deep learning. He added that current smart devices do not have strong smart processing capabilities, as existing CPUs and GPUs are incapable of performing smart computing very well. In this regard, new processors with strong deep learning capabilities are badly needed to make terminal devices really smart, constituting a huge market.

Chen stressed that the key to promoting the application of AI chips is to establish open ecosystems. Without supporting software systems and ecosystems, AI chips cannot be well applied by developers of smart terminal devices, Chen said, adding that only through open AI industry ecosystems can AI applications move forward faster via integrations with robots, the financial and manufacturing sectors and others.

Cambricon and Dawning Information Industry, both affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have jointly launched their first AI server, Phaneron, offering an environment for online inference to facilitate deep learning.