Huawei is seeking to embrace artificial intelligence technologies across a wide variety of product categories through Project Da Vinci, an internal initiative that some of the company’s executives also call “Project D,” The Information reports, citing sources close to the Chinese manufacturer. The program itself is understood to be extremely comprehensive in nature, spanning everything from consumer electronics to telecom equipment, though Huawei is still said to be placing an emphasis on the former. In regards to other applications, the company is reportedly planning to mount a challenge to NVIDIA’s data center chips with hardware of its own, having already tasked its subsidiary HiSilicon with developing new AI modules.
While the U.S. government is unlikely to accept such hardware anytime soon given Huawei’s long history of issues in the country, the Shenzhen-based original equipment manufacturer likely isn’t targeting stateside data centers at all. Instead, it’s expected to challenge NVIDIA in its home country given how China presently accounts for nearly a quarter of the chipmaker’s revenue. Project Da Vinci also includes Huawei’s surveillance services and is directly related to camera feed analysis solutions the company is presently offering in some 90 countries across four continents, as per the same report.
The initiative should also play a large part in Huawei’s wireless endeavors, especially in conjunction with the fifth generation of mobile networks that the technology juggernaut largely pioneered, as evidenced by its numerous patents in the field. The existence of Project Da Vinci became known only several months after one HiSilicon official said Huawei’s semiconductor subsidiary sees Qualcomm as its “number one” rival in the chip market, indicating the company will continue increasing its reliance on its own hardware instead of strengthening the American firm. Such an approach should make Huawei more resistant to potential trade sanctions such as the one the Commerce Department imposed on ZTE this spring, forbidding it from purchasing American technologies due to import embargo violations and effectively crippling the entirety of its global operations.