Dong Bin, vice-president of iFlytek Brand and Marketing Center, introduces the company’s AI-powered health applications on Aug 6. [Photo by Li Huixian/chinadaily.com.cn]
Amid Western tech containment and export curbs, suffering sanctions or driven by a wake-up call, many Chinese tech firms have been forced to turn to domestic alternatives.
Despite the challenges, they are doubling down on R&D, bracing for short-term pain while betting on long-term gains, and pursuing self-reliance in science and technology.
A case in point is iFlytek, a leading full-stack AI technology firm in Hefei, East China’s Anhui province. Having lost access to high-end US computing chips in recent years, the company has successfully developed large AI models using Huawei’s Ascend chips instead.
Back in 2023, iFlytek partnered with Huawei for computing power. Dong Bin, a vice-president of iFlytek’s Brand and Marketing Center, acknowledged the early constraints. “Adapting each algorithm iteration — whether fast-thinking, deep-reasoning, or mixture-of-experts models — took over six months to reach more than 80 percent of the performance of high-end Nvidia chips,” Dong said. He noted that the unveiling of Huawei’s Atlas 950 SuperPoD and Sugon’s 100,000-card Dawning 8000 supercluster in July has bolstered confidence in superior domestic substitutes.
Zhang Youguo, senior vice-president of iFlytek, said the company and Huawei identified numerous problems and made adjustments to improve training efficiency for large models. The development of effective domestic substitutes once led to a relaxation of certain US chip restrictions. Without this capability, however, the controls would likely have been further tightened.
After nearly four years, iFlytek has launched Spark X2, a large model with 293 billion parameters, according to the company. While having parameter count gap with models such as Anthropic’s Claude and Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, Spark X2’s distinctive strength lies in supporting more than 130 languages. It has been deployed in AI-powered education and healthcare applications, reaching “smart schools” across more than 30 provincial-level regions.
Additionally, the model provides multilingual in-vehicle voice solutions, enabling Chinese automakers to enhance services in 32 languages abroad, with strong partnerships already established with electric vehicle brands like Chery and BYD.
In Lu’an, Anhui, at Mingtian Hydrogen Energy, technical director Pan Yongzhi recalled that in 2017 an imported air compressor cost 178,000 yuan ($26,382) and took three months to arrive, with an extra 100,000 yuan required for expedited delivery. Today, a domestic alternative is available for just 14,000 yuan.
At Lu’an GaN Semiconductor, which specializes in gallium nitride chip production, R&D spending has consistently surpassed 30 percent of annual revenue. According to Chairman Kan Hongzhu, the use of domestic equipment has increased from about 30 to 70 percent over the past five years.
Pursuing technological breakthroughs has strengthened these sci-tech innovators’ resilience.
Currently, sci-tech innovators in Anhui are brimming with vitality and showing potential for multi-sector growth. Looking ahead, fields such as embodied intelligence and world models are also drawing attention from Anhui’s tech enterprises. For example, BAIZ, a new startup, is focused on enhancing robotic cognition, aiming to surpass the intelligence of a robot’s “cerebellum” action layer.
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