The Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba Group Holding, has acquired Hangzhou C-SKY Microsystems, a hardware design firm, to produce its own Artificial Intelligence (AI) chips.
Alibaba will create its own Artificial Intelligence chips
According to a Technology Review report, the chip in question is called Ali-NPU (Neural Processing Unit), and as mentioned above, it will specialize in handling activities inherent to AI, such as image and video analysis. In this sense, the company assures that it has 10 times the performance of a GPU or CPU dedicated to the same task.
The development of this hardware is the responsibility of DAMO Academy, Alibaba’s Research and Development (R&D) arm. It was also revealed that this initiative is part of an ambitious business plan to bring AI through cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In this way, according to the company, its chips will speed up the tasks of these devices and reduce their operating costs.
The race to develop AI chips continues, with companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook also starting to create their own processors based on this technology. Also, this announcement will surely inspire other China-based companies to join in this development, but many have already done so.
This partnership is of great importance to Alibaba, but on a general level, China benefits the most. The Asian country invests about US$ 200 billion annually in imports of integrated circuit chips, mainly from the United States.
Now, in the midst of a trade battle that we don’t know how it will end, using chips manufactured by a company within China will avoid higher costs and represent a more attractive option for the government.