Rebirth of Hong Kong Island, leading the technology war

Chapter 226: The Dilemma of HKUST Feixun

The interface on the phone screen keeps changing.

[Checking preconditions...]

[Available area in the area: Pass]

[Account deduction successful: HK$1500 million]

【Construction process started: Infrastructure Planning and Construction Center】

The interface on the screen switched and a progress bar appeared.

Hu Jiangshan breathed a sigh of relief, and the next step was the 15-day construction period.

This time is not long. You know, it takes a month to build a semiconductor production line.

Even the sci-fi office building on Tenglong Island took nearly a month to build.

The Infrastructure Planning and Construction Center requires a construction area of ​​5000 square meters, which is quite large, but it only took fifteen days, which is really extremely fast.

In fact, Hu Jiangshan was also spoiled by the Technology Engine APP.

You have to know that the buildings mentioned above, including tidal power stations and seawater desalination facilities, even if you put aside technical and financial issues, it will take at least several years to build any one of them normally.

But then again, the completion of the infrastructure planning and construction center does not mean that the infrastructure on Tenglong Island is complete. It still needs to be designed and constructed.

Hu Jiangshan estimated that it would take several months for him to come down after everything was built.

However, the facilities and functions in the technology engine app are relatively complete. For example, the special tool research and guidance center makes Hu Jiangshan feel very comfortable. He thinks that this infrastructure planning and construction center should be good as well.

The next day, Hu Jiangshan went to General Island again early in the morning.

In order to design the commuter boat well, Hu Jiangshan consulted a lot of information and spent several days to complete it. The commuter boat is a medium-sized ship and is quite majestic.

Hu Jiangshan conducted functional tests, and all of them passed successfully, and then he started the construction process.

The first commuter boat is about to be launched. To be absolutely sure, Hu Jiangshan wants to go and check out the construction progress. There must be no problems with such a large vehicle.

At the same time, in China, Heyue City.

Strictly speaking, Heyue City is a second-tier city in China, but in the past decade, Heyue City has developed very rapidly. Many emerging industries have developed well here, and even some technology manufacturing giants have set up headquarters or R&D centers here. So now Heyue City has been officially called a new first-tier city and is a core city in the region.

Keda Feixun is one of the technology giants that has established its headquarters in Heyue City.

You know, Keda Feixun is very famous in China. It is now the leader in China's artificial intelligence field. Only a few companies can be compared with this company, which is far ahead.

In a few years, artificial intelligence will be identified as the future development direction in the world, and may even trigger a technological revolution. The position of USTC Feixun will naturally become more and more stable.

If history had continued to develop, HKUST Feixun would have faced bigger troubles at that time, which would be related to artificial intelligence chips.

And at this moment, due to various reasons, the trouble seemed to have arrived early.

Boss, in the office, Liu Qingfu was sitting at his desk drinking tea.

Liu Qingfu is now in his forties or fifties. He has maintained himself well overall, but his hair is a little sparse and has a Mediterranean trend, giving people the impression that he overworks his brain.

Liu Qingfu has a technical background and is an outstanding technical expert with a very high reputation.

As the saying goes, no grass grows on a busy road, and no hair grows on a smart head.

Although this statement has no scientific basis, there are many examples that show this.

Liu Qingfu took a sip of the tea water and found it tasted a little bitter. It might be because the tea leaves had been stored for too long and had become a little moldy.

Liu Qingfu is not a very particular person. He buys his tea from any small tea shop. His main concern is that it is drinkable and can relieve boredom.

Liu Qingfu put down his teacup and stared at the screen, looking carefully at a report. After a long time, he couldn't help but sigh.

The company’s situation has not been very good recently and we have encountered many problems.

There are bottlenecks in technological development, and what is worse is that no new profit point has been found. Now Feixun Technology is at risk of losses.

Although it is normal for technology companies to make losses, after all, the R&D investment is relatively large. As long as they are always optimistic and receive investment, it doesn't matter. However, Liu Qingfu doesn't like it.

Liu Qingfu is a very traditional entrepreneur. If the company suffers losses, even for a long time, he will not be able to sleep well.

But Liu Qingfu felt that his company would not reach that point, as Keda Feixun still had core technologies and strong capabilities.

You should know that although HKUST Feixun has produced many hardware devices, such as translation machines, reading pens, and even learning machines, its real technical strength lies in software.

Keda Feixun started out as a translation software company and has been working hard to develop it. It is now a well-known and leading company in China's translation industry.

However, the translation software and translation hardware industry has reached its peak. It will be difficult to move forward and improve. Without technological changes, it will be difficult to make major breakthroughs.

Liu Qingfu is a man with great vision and he knows this very well, so he organized an in-depth discussion among the company's top management a few years ago and decided that the next technological breakthrough would be in one field - artificial intelligence.

Now, HKUST Feixun has made great progress in artificial intelligence, especially in algorithms, and it can be said that it is in a leading position in the world.

At this time, the famous openAI company that would become famous a few years later had just been established, and the so-called chatgpt model only had a prototype and had not yet achieved anything significant.

HKUST Feixun is also developing the same product now and has already produced results.

To put it bluntly, HKUST Feixun is actually a pioneer and leader in the field of large-scale artificial intelligence models.

If HKUST Feixun continues to develop smoothly, it will surely become the leading force in artificial intelligence on the entire Blue Planet, and its comprehensive strength will be able to crush any opponent.

But the problem is that HKUST Feixun will encounter many obstacles, the biggest of which is hardware.

The chips that can now support computing are not controlled by the Chinese, and the GPU chips used are from the Lighthouse Country company Eagle NVIDIA.

As we all know, GPU chips are generally used on gaming graphics cards, mainly for graphics calculations and to support game operations, but GPU chips also have a capability that is also derived from data calculations.

The more powerful the GPU chip, the faster the data calculations.

Therefore, a large number of gaming graphics card chips were used in mining machines later. The so-called mining factories were filled with rows of graphics cards connected in series, which was very spectacular.

The most popular among these graphics cards are products from Eagle NVIDIA, because their GPU computing power is powerful enough, their computing speed is fast enough, their mining efficiency is the highest, and they are almost unrivaled.

Although the process difficulty of GPU chips is much lower than that of processor chips, that is, logic chips, Eagle NVIDIA has been in this industry for many years and is not a pushover. It has almost formed a monopoly position, so it makes a lot of money from mining machines.

Since GPU chips can be used for mining, they can certainly be used for artificial intelligence computing.

Since the concept of artificial intelligence emerged, Eagle NVIDIA's GPU chips have become popular again, and they are selling more and more, with a higher market share. Of course, the market is still too small now, and Eagle NVIDIA has not made much money on it, but this may not be the case in the future.

Eagle Insight is also very optimistic about the field of artificial intelligence hardware and is vigorously developing it, doing its utmost to grab market share in an attempt to monopolize this market.

How did Eagle Weida do it?

Previously, Eagle NVIDIA did not regulate the market, allowing all companies engaged in artificial intelligence development to easily buy GPU chips or gaming graphics cards at very fair prices, all shipped at wholesale prices.

Companies in the artificial intelligence industry have very high demands for GPU chips, with orders ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands or even millions.

If the price is too high, then the cost is too great.

The key is that artificial intelligence is still an emerging industry and there are not many effective monetization channels. The investment is too huge and even large companies cannot afford it.

Yingwei Da has achieved its goal, and now its market share has risen to more than 80%, so the butcher's knife has finally fallen.

Eagle NVIDIA has begun raising prices for artificial intelligence companies that purchase graphics card chips in large quantities.

Moreover, the offers made to Chinese companies were the most aggressive, and HKUST was the most affected.

The reason why Liu Qingfu is so worried when seeing the financial report is that the gap in GPU chips is getting bigger and bigger.

As the demand for computing power grows, the demand for GPU chips will also grow.

But the strange thing is that Eagle Weida's offer to Keda Feixun is getting higher and higher. Now it is almost double the initial price, and Eagle Weida seems to be going to raise the price even higher, to the point where it is simply unbearable.

The company's top management, and even the boss Liu Qingfu himself, wondered if Eagle Weida had played some tricks. They had learned about the computing power development progress of Keda Feixun through some channel and found that it was developing too rapidly and urgently needed more computing chips, so they formulated a strategy of raising prices.

Anyway, Eagle Weida is the only one that can ship the products. No matter how expensive it is, Keda Feixun has no choice but to buy it, unless it gives up this business.

This is very possible. After all, HKUST Feixun has not taken strict confidentiality measures, so it is normal for any information to be leaked.

It’s no use saying anything now because we just lack chips.

If you want to get enough GPU chips, you have to place an order with NVIDIA, and you have to pay a much higher price than before.

Keda Feixun is not a very wealthy company. Although it has external capital injection and even official funding support, it is indeed not short of money, but it is not the kind of company that can spend money lavishly.

Fortunately, there is good news now. Huayao’s artificial intelligence chip, Ascend 910, will be released soon.

Some time ago, Huayao also sent a sample of Ascend 910. After being tested by the technical department of HKUST Feixun, it completely exceeded expectations and was even much stronger than the most powerful GPU chip of Eagle NVIDIA.

At that time, the top management of HKUST Feixun was very excited. If Huayao could really mass-produce Ascend 910 and ship it in large quantities, then HKUST Feixun would be able to get rid of the high-priced GPU chips from Invitrogen and would no longer be ripped off by others.

Moreover, Ascend 910 is a dedicated artificial intelligence computing chip that removes useless graphics computing functions. It is much more convenient to use than NVIDIA's GPU chip, and its performance will certainly be greatly improved.

More importantly, Huayao’s offer is not high.

The technical department has calculated that buying one thousand Ascend 910 chips is more cost-effective than buying two hundred Eagle NVIDIA GPU chips.

But unfortunately, there is no news from Huayao yet, and it is not certain whether Ascend 910 can be successfully mass-produced.

Liu Qingfu couldn't sleep well because the matter couldn't be settled.

Sad, so sad.

At this moment, there was a knock on the door.

"Please come in."

The door opened and Jiang Jinlong came in.

As mentioned earlier, Jiang Jinlong is the technical director of HKUST Feixun. He is highly capable and well-known both at home and abroad.

"Jinlong, please sit down. Would you like some tea?"

Jiang Jinlong waved his hand, indicating that he didn't want to drink tea. Perhaps he knew that Liu Qingfu's tea was not very good and not tasty.

Jiang Jinlong said: "Mr. Liu, I want to tell you something."

Liu Qingfu nodded: "Well, just say whatever you want to say."

Jiang Jinlong said: "Mr. Liu, you should have seen the latest report, right?"

"Yes, I have."

Liu Qingfu took a sip of tea and knew what Jiang Jinlong wanted to say.

"Mr. Liu, we have to think of a solution now. The computing power has reached a bottleneck and we need more hardware to move forward."

Liu Qingfu sighed: "There is still no news from Huayao. There is really nothing we can do. If it really doesn't work..."

Liu Qingfu looked out the window and said, "If it doesn't work, let's talk to the people from Ying Weida again."

Jiang Jinlong was stunned for a moment, then shook his head: "Boss Liu, this won't work. Ying Weida's offer is too high. Even if we can negotiate a little bit, it's still expensive."

Liu Qingfu sighed: "There is no other way. No other company makes this kind of thing."

Jiang Jinlong thought for a moment and said, "Why not talk to AMD? Their offer might be lower."

Liu Qingfu snorted coldly: "It is indeed cheaper, but not much cheaper, and the performance of their products... is not as good as that of Yingweida."

Jiang Jinlong thought about it and it made sense. Even if AMD's products were cheaper, if the performance was taken into account, it might be better to just buy NVIDIA's GPU chips.

Huayao's distant water cannot quench immediate thirst.

Now I am really in a dilemma.

Liu Qingfu sighed again: "There is no other way. Let's make an appointment with the people from Yingweida. We will have a good discussion with them and try to lower the price as much as possible."

Jiang Jinlong had no choice but to nod.

Eagle Weida's efficiency is quite good, and it is considered quite strong among the many large companies in the Lighthouse Country.

The next day, Ying Weida's special envoy arrived in Heyue City.

There were two people in total. After they got off the high-speed train, they called the people from HKUST Feixun and they said they would send a car to pick them up and take them to the headquarters.

(End of this chapter)