China’s Tencent launches three new chips

GUANGZHOU, China — Tencent on Wednesday launched three chips it developed, marking the first time the Chinese internet giant has publicly spoken about its progress in semiconductors.

It comes as China continues to try and bolster its domestic chip industry, making it 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 service WeChat, has been investing in areas including chips and cloud computing to diversify its business.

One of the semiconductors is an artificial intelligence chip called Zixiao. The chip is able to process images, video and natural language, which could be used for AI voice assistants, for example, that rely on the ability for computers to understand and process human language.

However, Chinese companies are only designing their own chips. Manufacturing and other parts of the supply chain still rely heavily on foreign companies, which is a challenge to China’s domestic ambitions.

Tencent did not reveal which companies were manufacturing the silicon.

“Chips are the core part of hardware and the core infrastructure of the industrial internet,” Dowson Tong, the CEO of Tencent’s cloud and smart industry group said in an official WeChat post by the company.