By Josh Ye
HONG KONG (Reuters) – Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings said on Monday its self-developed video transcoding chip Canghai has entered mass production and is currently supporting services from cloud gaming to video live streaming.
The Shenzhen-based company, best known for its popular messaging platform WeChat, said in a post published online that tens of thousands of its Canghai chips, first revealed in 2021, have been serving clients in areas ranging from cloud gaming to video live streaming.
The Canghai chip “focuses on solving the impossible triangle of high image quality, low latency, and low cost in video encoding and decoding”, the company said in the post.
Mostly known as a software company, Tencent unveiled three self-designed chips in 2021, joining other Chinese tech giants in answering Beijing’s call to help China develop its own semiconductor industry amid a growing number of U.S. sanctions.
Besides Canghai, Tencent has also designed an artificial intelligence chip named Zixiao and a network interface controller chip called Xuanling.
“Tencent has a long-term plan to research and develop as well as invest in semiconductors,” the company said，
“Several chips have entered the market at scale.”
The company said its AI inference chip Zixiao, which aims to accelerate computing efficiency, has been deployed in handling internal businesses.
Meanwhile, its Xuanling chip is now helping the company “build the next generation of high-performance network infrastructure”.
(Reporting by Josh Ye; editing by Jason Neely)
