Over the past two years, Chinese cloud vendors have fought a long price war around tokens. From DeepSeek V2 igniting the price drop in 2024, to Volcano Engine's Doubao firing the battle with a 0.0008 yuan/1k token price, to the Coding and video-model token consumption surge triggered by DeepSeek R1, compute gross margin was once compressed to negative — everyone was competing on whose token is cheaper, who serves more calls.
At the Huawei Cloud INSPIRE Innovators Conference on June 5, CEO Zhou Yuefeng gave a different answer: "Huawei Cloud doesn't care much about the total amount of tokens, nor the total revenue. What we care about is whether the tokens produced by domestic compute truly represent productivity improvements." This is the "third path" Huawei Cloud is betting on — not competing on unit price and call volume, but betting on the self-controllability of domestic compute, and whether it can truly make enterprises more efficient.
Around this strategy, Huawei Cloud has built a complete Agentic Infra base. The core is the AICS Lingqu Intelligent Computing Cluster, supporting 100,000-card scale based on the Lingqu network, with a total compute of 200 EFLOPS, token latency compressed to under 10 milliseconds, and 5 million tokens per second per 1,000 cards, with availability 99.95% — what Huawei Cloud calls the "Token factory." Supporting CCE Volcano Next scheduling engine uses "training-inference shared pool + fragmentation integration" to boost resource utilization by 30%; AMS uses NPU direct-attached hardware to support PB-level memory space; ModelArts Next packages model routing, confidential inference, and RL-as-a-service, currently aggregating 15+ SOTA models, with scheduling accuracy over 95% and average call cost down 20%.
The underlying confidence comes from the Ascend ecosystem. Earlier this year, Huawei Cloud and SiliconFlow ran DeepSeek-R1/V3 on the CloudMatrix384 supernode, with inference efficiency already able to match H800; industry landings such as Ruijin Hospital's pathology large model and the humanoid robot CloudRobo push the "silicon-based black soil" narrative to the front.
Commentary: When the large-model competition moves from "competing on parameters" to "competing on engineering and compute autonomy," Huawei Cloud is betting the Token factory and Agentic Infra on domestic compute, which has both commercial rationality and carries the bet of the domestic chip ecosystem's breakout. Whether this path works will directly determine the boundary of voice for domestic compute in the AI era.