Tencent Games and Huawei established a joint innovation lab to develop a cloud-gaming platform running on the vendor’s home-grown Kunpeng processor, one of several moves the company made to expand the market for the silicon.

In a statement, Tencent SVP Ma Xiaoyi said its strategic collaboration with Huawei will combine the companies’ strengths in gaming. In future, the company will will use Kunpeng processors to “build quality, cost-effective” mobile cloud gaming services.

Ma noted Tencent Games recently developed the GameMatrix platform designed for mobile cloud gaming.

The announcement was made at Huawei’s Developer Conference 2020, a two-day online event which opened today (27 March) where the company also committed to investing an additional $200 million this year to promote its Developer Program 2.0 through support for universities, start-ups, developers and partners.

Huawei launched the programme in 2019, earmarking $1.5 billion over five years to promote industry development.

In a keynote, the president of Huawei’s Cloud and AI business group Hou Jinlong (pictured) branded developers “the key to changing the computing world”, noting key roles in powering “enterprise innovations” and new industry ecosystems.

He said the vendor had signed up 1.6 million developers since initiating the scheme, which aims to attract 5 million in total over its tenure. Huawei will work with those companies and other industry partners to “provide robust, economical computing power by leveraging the multi-core, high-concurrency advantages of Kunpeng processors”.

Over the past 15 months, it doubled efforts to develop in-house components, including the Kunpeng line of processors, as it faces US trade restrictions on its supply of chips, with companies now requiring a licence to do business with the vendor.

Huawei unveiled the Kunpeng 920 chipset in January 2019, at the time claiming it was the industry’s highest-performance ARM-based server CPU.