Tencent has significantly upgraded its HPC network, known as Xingmai, improving AI capabilities in network communications by as much as 60% and LLM training by 20%.
The upgrade, reported by the South China Morning Postreflects a broader effort by Chinese tech giants to increase technological self-sufficiency as access to cutting-edge processors such as Nvidia’s H100 is limited by strict U.S. export controls.
The report says that the Xingmai 2.0 network significantly improves the efficiency of how computer clusters communicate with each other. Previously, excessive communication time between clusters led to underutilized GPU capabilities. By upgrading the network, Tencent has not only boosted the communication process but also reduced costs, a win-win situation for the company.
Internally developed LLMs
The upgrade comes as Chinese companies increasingly seek to reduce their reliance on foreign technology and come up with ingenious ways to circumvent the US export ban. In a previous example of this, we saw Huawei improve the performance of its AI chip by adding a vector unit to each core and increasing the clock speed to compensate for having fewer active AI cores.
Unlike its U.S. rivals that are focused on increasing spending and acquiring cutting-edge semiconductors, Tencent has achieved its performance gains by optimizing its existing facilities. The upgraded network now supports more than 100,000 GPUs in a single cluster, doubling initial capacity and reducing troubleshooting time from days to just minutes.
The Shenzhen-based company’s progress in AI is not limited to infrastructure improvements. South China Morning Post reports that Tencent actively promotes its internally developed LLMs for enterprise applications, as well as provides services that help other companies develop their own AI models.
The Chinese AI industry is currently embroiled in a price war, with major companies such as Tencent, ByteDance, Baidu and Alibaba significantly cutting costs in an attempt to undercut Western competitors. Tencent recently made its Hunyuan LLM lite version free and cut prices for standard versions, following similar moves by its rivals.