China chipmakers are catching up fast in AI, SenseTime’s Xu says

China’s domestic AI chipmakers are making fast progress in closing the gap on international leaders, according to SenseTime Group Inc. co-founder Xu Bing.

Asia has a shortage of computation power for artificial intelligence, lagging significantly behind the US, but China has the talent and data to make up lost ground, Xu said in an interview at the UBS Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong. SenseTime is one of China’s artificial intelligence pioneers, though it’s been placed on a US investment blacklist as part of sweeping American sanctions curbing the country’s advances in AI.

China’s progress in this field has been made more difficult by US trade controls preventing the import of Nvidia Corp.’s advanced AI accelerators. That’s sparked the need for domestic alternatives from the likes of Huawei Technologies Co. and Shanghai Biren Technology Co., which are both also subject to US trade restrictions.

“There’s a shortage of resources here in Asia in general,” Xu told Bloomberg’s David Ingles. “It’s like a 10 times gap of the compute resources that we have here compared to the US leaders. But I think Asian markets never lack talent and never lack data.”