From September 6 to 7, 2024, the 2024 Global AI Chip Summit (GACS 2024) was held in Beijing. As one of the largest-scale, highest-standard, and most influential chip industry summits in China, this year's event themed "Intelligent Computing Era: Co-building the Chip Road" gathered top global experts from industry, academia, research, application, and investment and financing fields of AI chips to discuss the opportunities and challenges of Chinese AI chips in the era of generative AI.

At the morning plenary forum, Liu Jianwei, Co-founder and Vice President of Axera, attended the high-end dialogue session. He discussed the consensus, co-creation, and win-win outcomes for the implementation of domestic AI chips with leaders of leading domestic AI chip enterprises, and shared the latest industry insights.

Currently, affected by the complex international environment and intensified market competition, the domestic chip industry is facing unprecedented challenges. On the one hand, there are certain doubts about the profitability of AI chips from the outside; on the other hand, the slowdown of the domestic capital market has also had a certain impact on industry investment and financing. Faced with this predicament, Liu Jianwei stated that with the improvement of the intelligence level in production and daily life, the profitability of AI chips is unquestionable. However, the industry's development follows inherent laws, and enterprises need to abide by the rhythm and seek a breakthrough in self-sustainability. It is precisely by recognizing this law that Axera has chosen to focus on segmented fields with mature commercialization at the end and edge sides. This healthy and stable business closed-loop has also enabled Axera to gain the favor of more high-quality capital.

Today, as global chip giants remain the mainstream choice for enterprises, domestic new chip-making forces need to make greater efforts. When asked how to achieve a breakthrough, Liu Jianwei said that ecosystem construction is currently Axera's top priority. Secondly, domestic chip manufacturers have a better understanding of the substantive needs of local enterprises, which is also their advantage. He introduced that the smart city and intelligent driving fields that Axera focuses on have certain regional characteristics: the former is more favored by local manufacturers, while after international giants have paved the way for the latter, as enterprises enter a period of demand for cost control and rapid response, domestic chip enterprises represented by Axera that are good at providing localized solutions have gained more opportunities.

 

Currently, Axera has achieved remarkable results in market share in both smart city and intelligent driving fields. Based on this, Liu Jianwei focused on elaborating on the thinking behind Axera's "Integrated Layout with Dual Wings" strategy during the dialogue — intelligent driving and smart cities share common underlying technical logic, and Axera's two core technologies, AxeraNeurons NPU and AxeraVision AI-ISP, can better match market demands. This enables Axera to quickly achieve mass production after accumulating mature technical experience in smart cities, and explore more strongly related scenarios while deepening its advantages in key areas, thereby ensuring a sustained and stable development path for the enterprise.

With the deepening of the price war in intelligent vehicles, upstream enterprises in the industry have been impacted to a certain extent, and cost control has become an inevitable issue for automotive chip enterprises. In this regard, Liu Jianwei stated that the price war in the automotive industry is a good thing for enterprises with self-developed technologies. Compared with the past, automakers are more cost-sensitive, and upstream enterprises with independent R&D capabilities have greater advantages in cost control. Axera has always positioned itself as a chip company, which determines that it can maintain a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship with Tier 1 enterprises, and indirectly help reduce automotive costs, truly realizing "Inclusive AI, for a Better Life".