No need for Nvidia: iFlytek touts reasoning model trained entirely with Huawei's AI chips

South China Morning Post

22-04-2025

Chinese voice-recognition firm iFlytek said that training its large language models (LLM) entirely with
Huawei Technologies' computing solutions has increased its growth potential amid the intensifying US-China tech war, after the Trump administration moved to restrict the export of
Nvidia's H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China.
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iFlytek on Monday boasted that its Xinghuo X1 reasoning model, a 'self-sufficient, controllable' LLM trained with home-grown computing power, had matched OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1 in overall performance following an upgrade, according to a company blog post published on WeChat.
iFlytek and Huawei had worked together in the training of Xinghuo X1 to tackle the weakness of domestic chips in interconnect bandwidth, the company said in January when announcing the reasoning model.
At the end of last year, the efficiency of Huawei's Ascend 910B AI chip was only 20 per cent that of Nvidia's solution for the training of reasoning models, but iFlytek and Huawei have jointly increased that to nearly 80 per cent this year, iFlytek founder and chairman Liu Qingfeng said on Tuesday during an earnings call with investors.
A file photo of iFlytek chairman Liu Qingfeng speaking during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, August 29, 2019. Photo: VCG via Getty Images
iFlytek first touted its LLM co-development with Huawei
in June last year. The company's efforts to double down on domestic computing infrastructure comes amid tightening chip restrictions from the US.
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