Tencent unveiled three chips it developed on Wednesday, marking the first time the Chinese internet giant has publicly discussed its semiconductor progress.
Tencent's new products include an artificial intelligence (AI) chip for inference, a video transcoding chip, and an intelligent network chip, according to Tang Daosheng, a senior executive vice president at Tencent.
"Chips are the core part of hardware and the most core infrastructure of industrial Internet," Tang said.
China is attempting to strengthen its domestic chip industry, which has become a strategic priority for the country's technology sector.
Tencent, one of the world's largest gaming companies and the operator of China's most popular messaging app WeChat, has been diversifying its business by investing in areas such as chips and cloud computing.
Zixiao, an artificial intelligence chip, is one of the semiconductors. The chip can process images, video, and natural language, and it could be used in AI voice assistants that rely on computers' ability to understand and process human language, for example.
A video transcoding chip is the second chip. These are needed to convert videos into various formats. The third is a network card that aids cloud computing processes.
Tencent established a chip research and development laboratory in 2020. The company invested in AI chip start-up Enflame, which recently released the second generation of chips, which are expected to go into mass production by the end of 2021.
Tencent isn't the only company that has its own chip development team. Many Chinese tech companies have begun to invest in chip research in order to advance breakthroughs in leading-edge technologies in the semiconductor industry.
Alibaba announced a new self-designed server chip on Oct. 19, which was taped out in July and will be used in the Alibaba Cloud data center. Baidu announced on Aug. 18 that its second-generation AI chips are now being mass-produced for intelligent transportation systems.
Chinese companies, however, only design their own chips. Manufacturing and other parts of the supply chain continue to be dominated by foreign companies, posing a challenge to China's domestic ambitions.
Tencent did not say which companies were responsible for the silicon's production.
