Ma Huateng Announces Tencent to Start Chip R&D to Boost Development of China's Chip Industry

[Ma Huateng announces that Tencent has started chip development to boost the development of China's chip industry] Recently, Tencent CEO Ma Huateng reflected on the impact of the ZTE event on China's science and technology industry in the keynote speech delivered at the "Future Forum X Shenzhen Summit," and launched a summit at the summit. Teng said that without chips and operating systems, the competition is certainly not enough.

In the Internet industry, we have new “four major inventions” and mobile payments are leading the world. However, according to Ma Huateng, this only represents the leading position in our science and technology application. In terms of scientific basic research, China's foundation is still relatively weak. Mobile payment is even more advanced, there is no mobile phone terminal, there is no chip and operating system, and if you compete, your strength is not enough.

Ma Huateng believes that Tencent can play two roles in promoting the domestic chip industry: First, Tencent has a large number of application services, large-scale users, there are many data centers, including clouds, can force the chip design industry for Tencent services and needs Do the design; second, create a spare tire.

Tencent is currently studying how to boost the development of China's chip industry, which may include using its huge data demand, urging domestic chip suppliers to come up with better solutions, or using the WeChat platform to support application development based on Chinese chips.

The following is the full text of Ma Huateng's speech:

Distinguished leaders, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon!

I am very honored that this is the third time I participated in the "Future Forum" in the past two years. When I first attended, I was witnessed by bystanders. At that time, I had not yet become a donor.

In the second session, I was honored to be one of the donors. I participated in the whole process of the awards. I was very formal. I also wanted to tie my necktie and read poetry. It was really hard for me to read Cantonese in my Mandarin, like me. For a long time.

Later, we said that this award was very successful and the industry has considerable influence. Can we invite these scientists who won the award to walk in other cities? With local young people? At that time, I raised my hand in the group of future forums for the first time. I said that if you come to Shenzhen, this place needs more.

The technological environment of Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao Bay Area, just as Secretary Wang Qiang just said, Shenzhen’s international PCT patents account for nearly half of the country’s total, and Nanshan’s accounted for half of Shenzhen’s, even when the highest peak reaches 25% of the country’s total. In the whole country's patent applications can reach 1/4 strong, I think this can be said to be the largest region in the country.

Although Secretary Wang Qiang just said that Nanshan’s GDP is the third in the country compared to the district’s GDP, it is the first in terms of density. I think it is also very meaningful for us to come to Nanshan to hold this event today.

Just now when we communicated in the conference room, we also mentioned that China’s science and technology have a unique feature. “The North is mainly based on basic disciplines, but the South has strong application of science and technology.”

This is indeed the case. Like the Internet industry we are in, although we are talking about the "new four major inventions," we say that mobile payments are leading the world. However, in reality, this is only the application of science and technology. Returning to basic scientific research, the whole of China is actually The foundation is still very weak.

In particular, the recent ZTE incident has made everyone even more aware of the fact that mobile payment is even more advanced, there is no mobile phone terminal, there is no chip and operating system, and if you compete, your strength is not enough. Today's ZTE incident is being properly resolved, but we still cannot take it lightly. At this time, we must pay more attention to the study of basic science.

In the past, everyone was more concerned with pragmatism, but after that, I think everyone is clear that we can no longer feel lucky and must devote more resources to basic scientific research. Future science awards and forums should be said to be timely and very forward-looking. Two years ago, it may not have thought of such a situation today, but today we have a lot of feelings.

I think that there are still many things to be done to develop basic scientific research, including government, production, education, and research.

Everyone often sees that doing basic research is not profitable. It is far from the deadline and the investment is large. It can be simpler to apply. Many people also asked companies like Tencent to ask what you should do as a technology company with a relatively large market value.

Many people give us suggestions. I recently thought about it. Many people say that you can't do anything from the chip to the operating system, or from artificial intelligence to quantum computing?

In the past, we felt that this industrial chain was far away from us. It seems to be far from the chip to do software and service. But in fact we have done a lot of data centers, including cloud, we have a certain influence on the needs of many servers, even including the chip, which means that we can force the chip design industry to design for our services and needs. In particular, our application services are massive and the scale of users is particularly large. This is what we can think of at the first time.

If we can get involved in supporting the development of some chips, it may be better. But this is frankly speaking, we are not necessarily good at it. We may also need to rely on other forces in the industry chain to do this.

On the other hand, some people also mentioned suggestions. I remember Professor Rao Yi's suggestion to me. Many universities in the country have a great demand for talents for basic disciplines. However, because many universities have limited funds, they say that these enterprises in the industry include many Can foundations focus on these scientists in some basic disciplines and attract them to return home and come to universities to fund them for basic research? This idea also gave me a lot of inspiration.

It was also suggested that we are subject to chips and operating systems. Why is it subject to the operating system? It is because many applications are incompatible with the system. For example, on the mobile phone side, Microsoft’s share of the operating system on the mobile phone side has dropped to almost 1%, because many applications do not support it, and its share is small. Like WeChat used to have mobile-end versions of Windows, the share is too small to be developed, the less mobile applications are developed, and the Windows version is even more affordable. This is a complementary process.

So we as an application developer, including the small programs we do in the application, if it is possible to directly support more services on domestic chips, a development can be run on the entire domestic chips, including the domestic operating system Being able to run, I think there is a chance to solve many problems with OTT. This is also what the industry may expect from Tencent.

This matter is still very forward-looking, it is not difficult, and it is possible to always make a spare tire, can never be used, this is a very real problem, but I think that the spare tire is valuable now, there is no spare tire will Forever being caught in the throat, this is a reflection.

I remember that Huawei Ren Zhengfei also said internally that they developed Hass chips, which means that you may always be making spare tires. At that time, many people did not understand it, but today this pattern may be more understood.

So I want to say that the entire industry, all of our friends here are paying more attention to the basic disciplines. Of course, not only information technology, but also biology, physics, materials science, and life sciences are all our basic disciplines. Another very important thing is that The content is to make full use of the advantages of Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao in the Bay Area, and everyone can work together to work together for this goal.

The protagonist of today is a scientist present here. I was particularly touched by the fact that even though it was spring, the pace of spring was too fast. Today it feels like summer. At thirty degrees, I feel that everyone’s enthusiasm for science is even hotter. Thank you again for coming to the scene. Thank you!

Technology giants are in action

In addition to Tencent, Alibaba and other Chinese tech giants have also begun operations.

On Monday, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu jointly spent 141 million U.S. dollars to announce their shareholding in the foundry giant Foxconn. This is part of the $1.3 billion Chinese company promises to invest, led by a number of state-owned companies. The funding will help the company develop next-generation wireless devices, data centers and robotics, as well as chips that may be used for these purposes.

Chinese tech giants can also create their own demand for domestically produced chips from their huge user base. For example, once Chinese branded smart phones are ready to go on the market, they can choose to use Chinese chips. Ma Huateng also suggested that software that is compatible with Chinese chips and local operating systems should be designed in the future.

In fact, Ali had investments in the semiconductor industry four years ago. In 2014, Ali began to invest in Zhongtianwei. At the same time, it also invested in five chip companies including the Cambrian, Barefoot Networks, Shen Jian, Nai Lai, and Jie Jie Technology. In contrast, Tencent is less concerned about this area. It is understood that Tencent participated in Barefoot Networks, a software-defined network (SDN) chip company, in 2016, and it seems that it has also cooperated with China's AI chip maker Bitland.

In addition, with the rise of smart appliances, the demand for chips in the home appliance market has increased significantly. Following Dongming Zhu's high-profile external assertion that Gree will not hesitate to invest 50 billion yuan to enter the chip field, Konka Group also announced that it will establish a semiconductor technology division and formally enter the semiconductor industry.

Beijing, on the other hand, has also been pushing for more Chinese-made chips and plans to invest more in this issue. The government is preparing to provide nearly $50 billion in funds to stimulate the development of the Chinese semiconductor industry. A similar fund was launched once in 2014 when it raised $21.8 billion, mainly funded by government-backed companies and industry participants.

Unmanaged Non-PoE

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