China trains 100-billion-parameter AI model on home grown infrastructure

China Telcom's AI Research Institute claims it trained a 100-billion-parameter model using only domestically produced computing power – a feat that suggests Middle Kingdom entities aren't colossally perturbed by sanctions that stifle exports of Western tech to the country.

The model is called TeleChat2-115B and, according to a GitHub update posted on September 20, was "trained entirely with domestic computing power and open sourced."

"The open source TeleChat2-115B model is trained using 10 trillion tokens of high-quality Chinese and English corpus," the project's GitHub page states.

The page also contains a hint about how China Telecom may have trained the model, in a mention of compatibility with the "Ascend Atlas 800T A2 training server" – a Huawei product listed as supporting the Kunpeng 920 7265 or Kunpeng 920 5250 processors, respectively running 64 cores at 3.0GHz and 48 cores at 2.6GHz.

Huawei builds those processors using the ...