HANGZHOU: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd is rolling out what it calls China’s most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) chip, an accelerator to compete with Nvidia Corp and underpin a massive expansion of data centre (DC) capacity in coming years.
The eCommerce company turned AI-aspirant yesterday outlined a new Zhenwu V900 accelerator that it says triples the performance of its predecessor.
From Alibaba’s T-Head chip division, it can be combined in clusters of up to 500,000 units to power frontier-model training, chief executive officer Eddie Wu said.
Alibaba is among the biggest spenders on AI among leading Chinese players.
It’s committed to spending more than US$53bil over a three-year period to expand its AI capabilities, and raised about US$10.2bil from a follow-on share offering in Hong Kong in August.
Yesterday, Wu set a target of 20 gigawatts or GW of DC capacity for its Alibaba Cloud service by 2032, on the expectation of “exponentially rising demand for AI”.
Wu spoke as global AI stocks rallied on early signs of success for Meta Platforms Inc’s new personal agent, reviving investor optimism after recent market uncertainties.
Alibaba has pledged to intensify its expenditure on AI hardware and infrastructure as Wu’s leadership team makes the pursuit of AI intelligence the company’s lodestar.
It also plans to list the T-Head chip design unit to tap interest in the white-hot AI accelerator market, Bloomberg has reported.
The company now plans to develop a model with between five trillion parameters and 10 trillion parameters.
This is far larger than what’s common today, which would be designed to handle longer and more complex tasks. — Bloomberg
