Huawei eyes backing 1 million AI developers in 3 years

The company hopes to bank on an AI industry that could grow to US$380b by 2025.

Developers might need to rev up their AI skills as Huawei is planning to support a million AI developers and partners for the next three years, said Huawei chief strategy marketing officer William Xu in his keynote speech for Huawei Connect 2018 in Shanghai, China.

This comes on the back of the company’s forecast that enterprises could take up 90% of a US$380b AI industry by 2025, Xu said. He follows the thought of rotating chairman Eric Xu’s previous keynote speech saying that the demand for data scientists and engineers will increase amidst the company's push for its AI strategy.

To ride on a booming industry, Xu introduced Huawei’s process to get industry AI running: firstly, by coming up with scenarios that dictate what AI should do; secondly, by translating human skills into AI; and thirdly, by creating practical value and generating data for training the machines.

Developers are part of Huawei’s ecosystem of partnerships to help them have a solid footing in the AI industry, which includes industry alliances, business alliances, and open source communities. “Managing cooperative relationships with our ecosystem partners is more important than managing Huawei’s own business growth,” the Huawei executive said.

“We believe that growing the industry and enlarging the market is far more important than increasing Huawei’s own share of that market,” Xu added. However, the company has still been aggressive in pushing for its products that target large enterprises and governments.

Huawei’s new products include their own developed AI chips in its Ascend series, the Atlas Intelligent Computing Platforms, and mobile data centres MDC 600 – which is a “more accessible” take on Google’s patented portable data centres.