A company in the United Arab Emirates called G42, which builds computer programs using artificial intelligence, says it will stop using parts made by Huawei, the Chinese tech company. This news comes after American investigators looked into G42’s connection to Huawei. G42 will make another announcement about this soon.
G42 Huawei’s chips for its AI services. However, they’re switching to new equipment called CS-2 from Cerebras. This change will cost billions and involve building a network of powerful AI computers. The U.S. government was worried about G42’s connection to Huawei, so G42 publicly stated they’ll stop working with them.
In a conversation with Financial Times, chief executive Peng Xiao said: “For better or worse, as a commercial company, we are in a position where we have to make a choice. We cannot work with both sides. We cannot. […] The impression we are getting from [the] US government and US partners is, we need to be very cautious.”
G42 to Switch from Huawei to Cerebras 
G42 is switching from Huawei’s AI equipment to new hardware from Cerebras. They’ll use Cerebras for future AI projects but won’t say if they’ll use Huawei’s old equipment anymore. G42’s CEO hinted that Huawei’s hardware isn’t good enough anyway, which makes sense since they just paid Cerebras a lot of money for something better.
“In order for us to further our relationship — which we cherish — with our U.S. partners, we simply cannot do much more with [previous] Chinese partners,” Xiao added.
G42 is using Cerebras-based machines for its work. It might be possible for them to move their current inference tasks to these machines. However, the feasibility of this is unclear, both technically and economically. Also, the U.S. restricts Chinese companies from getting AI hardware. So, they must use processors made in their own country or go for cloud AI services, like the ones provided by G42.
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G42 is Already Building a Supercomputer using Cerebras’s Chip 
G42 is building supercomputers for AI with Cerebras’s huge chip, the WSE-2. This chip is giant, with 2.6 quadrillion transistors and 850,000 AI brains. It powers G42’s Condor Galaxy supercomputers like CG-1 in California, which can handle big language models with billions or even trillions of connections. G42 and Cerebras plan to build six of these supercomputers worldwide. This worries the US government because China might use them for AI training. This puts G42 in the middle of US-China disagreements, but it helps the UAE diversify its economy.
