4 ms·

Anker made its own chip to bring AI to all its products

67 points by Brajeshwar 7mo ago

55555 7mo ago
Literally had no idea they actually made tech. I thought they just private labelled charging cables and sold them on Amazon.
- echelon 7mo ago
  Anker is a powerhouse and they've grown huge. Best chargers on the market, hands down. Best cables too. But they've gone into high end stuff. They make the Eufy brand of LiDAR smart vacuums for instance. All done in house, and consistently in the top rankings against market leaders like Roborock and Dreame. They're killing it. They're doing home security systems, and all sorts of stuff under the Eufy brand.
  - bookofjoe 7mo ago
    I love my Eufy camera: no subscription fee, plug-and-play, never a problem, just a crystal clear view of my driveway with never a glitch. Cost me around $35 a couple years ago.
  - derektank 7mo ago
    Did not realize the Eufy brand was affiliated with Anker. Feels like a missed opportunity, Anker has earned some goodwill from me that might sway my purchasing decisions in the home automation category
  - SyneRyder 7mo ago
    Love my Anker chargers. I like them even better than my Apple chargers now. Liked their wireless phone charger too, though the blue light on that was excessively bright. I have lots of Anker USB cables, no problems with them. Didn't know they made Eufy. That would make me highly consider Eufy for anything.
    - gib444 7mo ago
      What is there to "love" about an Anker charger out of curiosity (or, well, any charger)?
      - co-ent 7mo ago
        Pretty much what one of the posters above summarized. They were one of the first aftermarket brands for phone chargers that you didn't have to worry about what protocol your phone was going to try to use for fast charging, it'd just work™ and be more affordable than OEM. Add in mostly decent build quality and they got a surprisingly strong base for it.
      - SyneRyder 7mo ago
        Aside from that everything just works, and it has multiple ports (2 USB-C + 1 USB-A) & that build quality seems excellent... the Anker chargers I use are really small, highly portable, and they have a straight up-down design. I'm using the Nano II 65W and the 737 GaNPrime 120W. Something like the Apple MacBook chargers assumes there's lots of space below the power outlet for the charger to hang down. But often that isn't the case in a cafe, or sometimes even an airport, where the power outlet is almost level with the base of the desk you're working at. In those cases, you can't plug a MacBook charger in directly. You could use an extension power cord, but that means you're now carrying extra cables. With the Anker models I have, I just carry the charger itself and a short USB-C cable. The charger and cable fit into the zipper section of a small Lacdo USB Flash Drive Case I carry with me, so I have my charger & cables & USB sticks all in one small case. I usually take the 65W Nano II, which only has enough wattage for my laptop. But if I use the 737, I can charge my laptop and also charge my phone, plus maybe a Pebble watch while working. And this is all in the size of something that's maybe half as big as my old Apple MacBook power bricks and their single USB port. I did like how the Apple chargers had interchangeable heads for traveling overseas though. You can't do that on the Anker chargers. But the Anker ones do support international voltage, so you only need to plug a prong adapter on the end, no step-down converter or anything. I can fit an adapter for one country into my Lacdo case as well. It's nice to be able to grab just the one case and run out to the cafe when traveling.
      - 7mo ago
- BeetleB 7mo ago
  They make a lot of not-top-tier products. The products are usually quite good, but not the best. They're often the best value. (Very happy with my $60 Anker earbuds).
  - ryanisnan 7mo ago
    Anecdotally, I've always been reasonably pleased with their products. I think I've owned a couple of powerbanks, and a USB/HDMI hub. Of the <Insert_random_smattering_of_letters> brand names on Amazon, I do tend to lean towards them a bit more. edit: having said all of that, relating to this article, I don't want AI anywhere near the products of theirs I'm currently buying.
    - BeetleB 7mo ago
      Oh, they've been pushing AI on my earbuds for a long time now. I just ignore them.
  - Aurornis 7mo ago
    Anker is a brand where buying a product feels like pulling the lever on a slot machine. I'm either going to get a product that works great and I love it, or it's going to feel half-baked and fail early.
    - 28304283409234 7mo ago
      This. I bought two Anker laptop chargers and both died died within weeks. Not a fan.
      - Fire-Dragon-DoL 6mo ago
        They will replace your powerbrick though
  - bashZorina_09 7mo ago
    Extremely happy with my Anker Boom 2, it's amazing how much a clear and punch it packs for half the price of the nearest JBL product.
- 4ndrewl 7mo ago
  Another +1 for Anker kit - ime it just works, is reasonably priced, and seems to last (I'm still using a 10 year old usb battery of theirs).
- kqp 7mo ago
  They are one of the main players in cords, chargers, power banks, robot vacuum cleaners, smart home devices, and headphones and earphones, and also make a bunch of other stuff. They have $4B annual revenue. Some things are under the Eufy brand.
- ssl-3 7mo ago
  They've been first at a few things. For instance: Back in the Bad, Old Days, charging phones (especially smart phones) wasn't quite as simple as today. The aftermarket cables were shit. Brands came and went overnight (they still do, but they did then too), and even if a person eventually found some cables that worked then it was hard to get more of them later. The aftermarket charging bricks were shit. I had some that would make capacitive touchscreens go crazy. Some that barely worked. Some that got stinky-hot. The phone might have a USB port that looked about like all the others, but that didn't mean much: Different phone models had different ways for signalling/confirming/accepting charging capabilities, and they rarely lined up with the method a random charging brick used. Get the wrong combination on this double-locked mystery box, and it was possible to plug a phone and have it say it is charging -- even though the reported battery SoC is dropping before your eyes. That was the market. It was fragmented and dysfunctional, and the only sane method to simply charge a phone was to use OE cables with OE power bricks, for real money. --- Then Anker showed up, kind of out of nowwhere. And they were all like "Uh, guys? We sell stuff that actually works." And they were right. They put together cables that consistently didn't suck (which should not be hard, except...). They started selling charging bricks that worked well with most or all of the phones on the market -- fooling them into thinking they were talking to their OE brick so they'd behave themselves. It had been a terrible mess. A complete crapshoot. And then, Anker products just plugged in and worked. They did all the things they said they'd do. They did it so well that they raised the bar for the entire industry. And, nowadays, it's not so bad. It's easy-enough to get a reliable cable or a charging brick that isn't a complete turd from a variety of names. That's not a thing that most of us think about much, if at all. But man, it was fucked up for a long time before Anker stuff became common.
  - dpoloncsak 7mo ago
    Didn't it come out that their cameras were uploading everything to the cloud even though they swore it didn't? I feel like I remember being very disappointed with Anker for something...
    - thejazzman 7mo ago
      Eufy was uploading the thumbnails to S3, if I recall correctly, so that they could be delivered in push notifications
coldtea 7mo ago
It's amazing how (based on polls, like https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/polling-reveals-that-americans-hate-ai-more-than-ice-yet-use-it-every-day/ar-AA1XVldi https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/polling-reveals-th...) the public dislikes it when it's shoved down its throat in unrelated programs and products (as opposed to them explicitly using an LLM or content generation program), but companies keep shoving it and even making a big deal out of doing so. Perhaps the best thing about 2026 Apple is how "behind" they are in "AI Integration". And even them have shoved useless features like "Image Playground" on us. Anyway, time to find another peripherals vendor. Who asked for AI on hubs and chargers?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- edu 7mo ago
  VCs
- frereubu 7mo ago
  They're not putting them on hubs and chargers, Anker make more than that. In the article it says that they're being used first in earbuds.
- echelon 7mo ago
  AI is polarizing. The rest of the world outside of the US and Europe loves AI. China is embracing it fully. Why is our Western media making the public hate it so much? It's almost as if it's a top down edict from all the news giants to constantly dump on AI and make it sound like it'll kill you. If we maintain this view, we're going to get steamrolled. And we'll have deserved it.
  - ktallett 7mo ago
    It isn't needed in every device. I don't need ai in a plug, or in a charging bank. I am perfectly capable of making a decision myself. I can use a piece of software without AI being helpful. Often I just want easy to use items that I have full control over and this lumping AI into everything is removing that.
angelgonzales 7mo ago
https://archive.ph/itJP1 https://archive.ph/itJP1
devonproctor 7mo ago
I've been quite happy with the AnkerWork S600[1], which I bought a couple years ago through Kickstarter. I don't know if it's the same chip, but they advertise a "professional NPU", and I find the voiceprint-based ambient sound rejection works very well. I can literally have my crying child in my lap and the other side of the phone call can't hear him. [1] https://us.ankerwork.com/pages/a3319-s600-all-in-one-speakerphone https://us.ankerwork.com/pages/a3319-s600-all-in-one-speaker...
fxtentacle 7mo ago
It's basically a DSP for noise cancellation. They just call it AI because, presumably, that'll increase their stock price.
- nearbuy 7mo ago
  It's not entirely clear from the article but it sounds like Thus is either this chip or a series of chips that run low power neural nets with millions of parameters and they intend to use them for other applications in IoT devices. It's a pretty central example of what we traditionally called AI before the term started being mostly used for LLMs.
  - fxtentacle 7mo ago
    If you look into ProTools hardware accelerator cards from 20 years ago, they were shock full with Sharc DSP chips, which are optimized for convolution and multiply add. Technically, AI Lora is surprisingly similar to how fake echo based on reverb IRs works in real time audio processing.
m3047 7mo ago
It's an audio processing chip, so probably not going to show up in a charging cable. Although the engineering part of my brain says "noise" shows up in a lot of places...
exabrial 7mo ago
I just want a battery pack with no ai
avipars 7mo ago
https://archive.md/itJP1 https://archive.md/itJP1

67 points by Brajeshwar 7mo ago

55555 7mo ago

Literally had no idea they actually made tech. I thought they just private labelled charging cables and sold them on Amazon.

echelon 7mo ago
Anker is a powerhouse and they've grown huge. Best chargers on the market, hands down. Best cables too. But they've gone into high end stuff. They make the Eufy brand of LiDAR smart vacuums for instance. All done in house, and consistently in the top rankings against market leaders like Roborock and Dreame. They're killing it. They're doing home security systems, and all sorts of stuff under the Eufy brand.
- bookofjoe 7mo ago
  I love my Eufy camera: no subscription fee, plug-and-play, never a problem, just a crystal clear view of my driveway with never a glitch. Cost me around $35 a couple years ago.
- derektank 7mo ago
  Did not realize the Eufy brand was affiliated with Anker. Feels like a missed opportunity, Anker has earned some goodwill from me that might sway my purchasing decisions in the home automation category
- SyneRyder 7mo ago
  Love my Anker chargers. I like them even better than my Apple chargers now. Liked their wireless phone charger too, though the blue light on that was excessively bright. I have lots of Anker USB cables, no problems with them. Didn't know they made Eufy. That would make me highly consider Eufy for anything.
  - gib444 7mo ago
    What is there to "love" about an Anker charger out of curiosity (or, well, any charger)?
    - co-ent 7mo ago
      Pretty much what one of the posters above summarized. They were one of the first aftermarket brands for phone chargers that you didn't have to worry about what protocol your phone was going to try to use for fast charging, it'd just work™ and be more affordable than OEM. Add in mostly decent build quality and they got a surprisingly strong base for it.
    - SyneRyder 7mo ago
      Aside from that everything just works, and it has multiple ports (2 USB-C + 1 USB-A) & that build quality seems excellent... the Anker chargers I use are really small, highly portable, and they have a straight up-down design. I'm using the Nano II 65W and the 737 GaNPrime 120W. Something like the Apple MacBook chargers assumes there's lots of space below the power outlet for the charger to hang down. But often that isn't the case in a cafe, or sometimes even an airport, where the power outlet is almost level with the base of the desk you're working at. In those cases, you can't plug a MacBook charger in directly. You could use an extension power cord, but that means you're now carrying extra cables. With the Anker models I have, I just carry the charger itself and a short USB-C cable. The charger and cable fit into the zipper section of a small Lacdo USB Flash Drive Case I carry with me, so I have my charger & cables & USB sticks all in one small case. I usually take the 65W Nano II, which only has enough wattage for my laptop. But if I use the 737, I can charge my laptop and also charge my phone, plus maybe a Pebble watch while working. And this is all in the size of something that's maybe half as big as my old Apple MacBook power bricks and their single USB port. I did like how the Apple chargers had interchangeable heads for traveling overseas though. You can't do that on the Anker chargers. But the Anker ones do support international voltage, so you only need to plug a prong adapter on the end, no step-down converter or anything. I can fit an adapter for one country into my Lacdo case as well. It's nice to be able to grab just the one case and run out to the cafe when traveling.
    - 7mo ago
BeetleB 7mo ago
They make a lot of not-top-tier products. The products are usually quite good, but not the best. They're often the best value. (Very happy with my $60 Anker earbuds).
- ryanisnan 7mo ago
  Anecdotally, I've always been reasonably pleased with their products. I think I've owned a couple of powerbanks, and a USB/HDMI hub. Of the <Insert_random_smattering_of_letters> brand names on Amazon, I do tend to lean towards them a bit more. edit: having said all of that, relating to this article, I don't want AI anywhere near the products of theirs I'm currently buying.
  - BeetleB 7mo ago
    Oh, they've been pushing AI on my earbuds for a long time now. I just ignore them.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  Anker is a brand where buying a product feels like pulling the lever on a slot machine. I'm either going to get a product that works great and I love it, or it's going to feel half-baked and fail early.
  - 28304283409234 7mo ago
    This. I bought two Anker laptop chargers and both died died within weeks. Not a fan.
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 6mo ago
      They will replace your powerbrick though
- bashZorina_09 7mo ago
  Extremely happy with my Anker Boom 2, it's amazing how much a clear and punch it packs for half the price of the nearest JBL product.
4ndrewl 7mo ago
Another +1 for Anker kit - ime it just works, is reasonably priced, and seems to last (I'm still using a 10 year old usb battery of theirs).
kqp 7mo ago
They are one of the main players in cords, chargers, power banks, robot vacuum cleaners, smart home devices, and headphones and earphones, and also make a bunch of other stuff. They have $4B annual revenue. Some things are under the Eufy brand.
ssl-3 7mo ago
They've been first at a few things. For instance: Back in the Bad, Old Days, charging phones (especially smart phones) wasn't quite as simple as today. The aftermarket cables were shit. Brands came and went overnight (they still do, but they did then too), and even if a person eventually found some cables that worked then it was hard to get more of them later. The aftermarket charging bricks were shit. I had some that would make capacitive touchscreens go crazy. Some that barely worked. Some that got stinky-hot. The phone might have a USB port that looked about like all the others, but that didn't mean much: Different phone models had different ways for signalling/confirming/accepting charging capabilities, and they rarely lined up with the method a random charging brick used. Get the wrong combination on this double-locked mystery box, and it was possible to plug a phone and have it say it is charging -- even though the reported battery SoC is dropping before your eyes. That was the market. It was fragmented and dysfunctional, and the only sane method to simply charge a phone was to use OE cables with OE power bricks, for real money. --- Then Anker showed up, kind of out of nowwhere. And they were all like "Uh, guys? We sell stuff that actually works." And they were right. They put together cables that consistently didn't suck (which should not be hard, except...). They started selling charging bricks that worked well with most or all of the phones on the market -- fooling them into thinking they were talking to their OE brick so they'd behave themselves. It had been a terrible mess. A complete crapshoot. And then, Anker products just plugged in and worked. They did all the things they said they'd do. They did it so well that they raised the bar for the entire industry. And, nowadays, it's not so bad. It's easy-enough to get a reliable cable or a charging brick that isn't a complete turd from a variety of names. That's not a thing that most of us think about much, if at all. But man, it was fucked up for a long time before Anker stuff became common.
- dpoloncsak 7mo ago
  Didn't it come out that their cameras were uploading everything to the cloud even though they swore it didn't? I feel like I remember being very disappointed with Anker for something...
  - thejazzman 7mo ago
    Eufy was uploading the thumbnails to S3, if I recall correctly, so that they could be delivered in push notifications

coldtea 7mo ago

It's amazing how (based on polls, like https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/polling-reveals-that-americans-hate-ai-more-than-ice-yet-use-it-every-day/ar-AA1XVldi https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/polling-reveals-th...) the public dislikes it when it's shoved down its throat in unrelated programs and products (as opposed to them explicitly using an LLM or content generation program), but companies keep shoving it and even making a big deal out of doing so. Perhaps the best thing about 2026 Apple is how "behind" they are in "AI Integration". And even them have shoved useless features like "Image Playground" on us. Anyway, time to find another peripherals vendor. Who asked for AI on hubs and chargers?

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
edu 7mo ago
VCs
frereubu 7mo ago
They're not putting them on hubs and chargers, Anker make more than that. In the article it says that they're being used first in earbuds.
echelon 7mo ago
AI is polarizing. The rest of the world outside of the US and Europe loves AI. China is embracing it fully. Why is our Western media making the public hate it so much? It's almost as if it's a top down edict from all the news giants to constantly dump on AI and make it sound like it'll kill you. If we maintain this view, we're going to get steamrolled. And we'll have deserved it.
- ktallett 7mo ago
  It isn't needed in every device. I don't need ai in a plug, or in a charging bank. I am perfectly capable of making a decision myself. I can use a piece of software without AI being helpful. Often I just want easy to use items that I have full control over and this lumping AI into everything is removing that.

angelgonzales 7mo ago

https://archive.ph/itJP1 https://archive.ph/itJP1

devonproctor 7mo ago

I've been quite happy with the AnkerWork S600[1], which I bought a couple years ago through Kickstarter. I don't know if it's the same chip, but they advertise a "professional NPU", and I find the voiceprint-based ambient sound rejection works very well. I can literally have my crying child in my lap and the other side of the phone call can't hear him. [1] https://us.ankerwork.com/pages/a3319-s600-all-in-one-speakerphone https://us.ankerwork.com/pages/a3319-s600-all-in-one-speaker...

fxtentacle 7mo ago

It's basically a DSP for noise cancellation. They just call it AI because, presumably, that'll increase their stock price.

nearbuy 7mo ago
It's not entirely clear from the article but it sounds like Thus is either this chip or a series of chips that run low power neural nets with millions of parameters and they intend to use them for other applications in IoT devices. It's a pretty central example of what we traditionally called AI before the term started being mostly used for LLMs.
- fxtentacle 7mo ago
  If you look into ProTools hardware accelerator cards from 20 years ago, they were shock full with Sharc DSP chips, which are optimized for convolution and multiply add. Technically, AI Lora is surprisingly similar to how fake echo based on reverb IRs works in real time audio processing.

m3047 7mo ago

It's an audio processing chip, so probably not going to show up in a charging cable. Although the engineering part of my brain says "noise" shows up in a lot of places...

exabrial 7mo ago

I just want a battery pack with no ai

avipars 7mo ago

https://archive.md/itJP1 https://archive.md/itJP1