Huawei to sell servers with own chips to boost its cloud computing business

China's Huawei, the world's largest telecom-equipment maker, on Wednesday said it will sell some servers powered by its own chips for the first time, doubling down on efforts to boost its cloud computing business.

This comes at a time when Huawei, which set up its cloud business unit last year, is trying to gain a firmer foothold in the public cloud market at home that is currently dominated by Alibaba.

Huawei's semiconductor arm, Hisilicon, already makes some chips the company uses in its smartphones and telecom equipment, but the servers it currently sells to telecom companies and cloud computing clients mostly use Intel chips.

Huawei did not say what percentage of the servers it makes will use its chips.

Its 7 nanometer Ascend 910 chipset, which the firm claims is twice as powerful as its nearest competitor Nvidia's v100, will be available from the second quarter of 2019.