Baidu-backed chip designer Kunlunxin wins millions of China Mobile orders

Chinese semiconductor design firm Kunlunxin, which is backed by Baidu, said it had won chip orders worth over a billion yuan ($139 million) for telecoms firm China Mobile's AI projects, as authorities push for domestic alternatives to Nvidia.

Kunlunxin will supply artificial intelligence chips compatible with Nvidia's CUDA software platform to firms such as H3C Technologies and telecoms equipment maker ZTE that are first-tier suppliers to China Mobile, it said in a statement released late on Thursday.

Tech giant Baidu owns 59% of Kunlunxin, Chinese corporate registry Qichacha shows.


A Huawei-related company also won part of the orders requiring hardware compatibility with Huawei's Compute Architecture for Neural Networks (CANN), an equivalent of CUDA, according to tender results published by China Mobile earlier.

Many developers rely on Nvidia's CUDA platform to build AI and other apps, which is optimised for Nvidia Graphics Processing Units.

In April, Baidu said it had successfully started running a cluster of 30,000 of its self-developed, third generation P800 Kunlun chips, which can support the training of models similar to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek.

Like Huawei's Ascend chips, Baidu's Kunlun chips are among a dozen of Chinese-made alternatives competing for market share with Nvidia GPUs. Baidu's and other domestic GPUs have better CUDA compatibility than Ascend, which is crucial for reducing extra costs for developers to shift from Nvidia's ecosystem.