Honor Device Pledges $10 Billion for AI in Bid to Be More Than a Phone Maker

(Bloomberg) -- Honor Device Co., 1 of China’s biggest smartphone makers, plans to put $10 cardinal implicit the adjacent 5 years to go a contender successful the artificial quality race.

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The Shenzhen-based company, which got its commencement arsenic a spinoff from Huawei Technologies Co., announced a caller firm strategy that centers connected gathering a device-centric AI ecosystem astatine Mobile World Congress. The funds for its concern propulsion volition travel from the institution and its investors, an Honor typical said, without providing further details. Honor’s biggest backers are section authorities entities and it besides has show shaper BOE Technology Group Co. and 2 of China’s mobile carriers among its investors.

Newly appointed Chief Executive Officer James Li, flanked by representatives from partners Qualcomm Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, acceptable retired the company’s program astatine the mobile industry’s biggest gathering successful Barcelona connected Sunday. Honor didn’t specify what it volition walk the wealth on, isolated from saying it’ll collaborate with planetary proviso concatenation and bearer partners, similar Orange and Telefonica, to co-create “a caller paradigm for AI devices successful the agentic AI era.”

Honor joins a unreserved toward AI crossed industries, which has been particularly pronounced successful China pursuing the breakthrough debut of DeepSeek’s reasoning chatbot. The country’s large net companies, from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Tencent Holdings Ltd., person accelerated updates to their AI models and started measuring themselves against the startup’s software. Honor aims to play a relation successful the contention for users by taking the instrumentality arsenic its starting point.

The company’s attack is besides distinctive for its adjacent collaboration with US partners. Honor works with Google Cloud connected the improvement of its AI cause and is integrating Google’s Gemini profoundly into its telephone software. At MWC, the institution besides introduced a Windows-powered AI PC successful the MagicBook Pro 14, adding to its collaboration with Microsoft Corp.

Questions persist astir the monetization imaginable of caller AI technologies and chatbots, with respective companies betting connected the exertion to chiefly thrust upgrades of hardware. Samsung Electronics Co. made a large propulsion successful that absorption past year, alongside Apple Inc. with the motorboat of Apple Intelligence connected the iPhone 16. Honor’s effort volition person to measurement up against those ventures arsenic good arsenic rising home contention successful China.