Huawei's pharmaceutical division leader clarifies company's focus on ai-driven drug development infrastructure

At the 11th Pharmaceutical Innovation and Investment Conference in Nanjing on October 24, Huawei's pharmaceutical division leader, Fan Jie, clarified that the company does not intend to directly engage in drug development. Instead, Huawei aims to provide computational, storage, networking, and data governance capabilities to pharmaceutical companies and AI drug development firms, positioning itself as a foundational technology platform for the AI drug development industry. Fan emphasized that while AI drug development is in a rapid growth phase, the full drug development pipeline remains unconnected. He highlighted the need for models to integrate with experimental data and decision-making processes. Additionally, Fan noted that Chinese pharmaceutical companies lag behind international counterparts in revenue, and AI's effectiveness must be validated through actual product pipelines and commercial outcomes. Huawei has already begun deploying large-scale computing clusters for drug development model training and optimization. Huawei's 1024-card super node solution is among the largest globally, and the company collaborates with firms like DeepScale and Molecule Heart to form a comprehensive ecosystem. The company has partnered with two medical firms to build large-scale computing clusters, investing nearly a billion yuan, and is supporting research institutions such as the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica and the Changping Laboratory.