Alibaba builds local AI cloud

Alibaba and China Telecom have launched an artificial intelligence data center in southern China built around 10,000 of Alibaba’s own Zhenwu chips. (cnbc.com) The facility is in Shaoguan, Guangdong province, and Alibaba said the chips are designed for both training and inferencing, the two main jobs behind large artificial intelligence systems. Alibaba said the cluster can support models with hundreds of billions of parameters. (cnbc.com) China Telecom will own and operate the site, while Alibaba supplies the semiconductors through its T-Head chip unit and sells related services through Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba and China Telecom said the project is expected to expand to 100,000 chips. (cnbc.com) A data center like this is the warehouse behind artificial intelligence software: racks of chips run the calculations that train models and answer user prompts. Building one with domestic chips gives Chinese cloud providers a way to keep adding computing capacity without depending entirely on imported Nvidia processors. (cnbc.com) That shift comes after the United States tightened export controls on advanced computing chips for China in rules issued on October 7, 2022, and updated on October 17, 2023. The Bureau of Industry and Security said those rules retained licensing requirements for the People’s Republic of China and broadened restrictions on related technology. (bis.gov) Alibaba tied the launch to a broader internal push on artificial intelligence. On April 8, Chief Executive Eddie Wu also announced a technology committee led by Wu, Chief Artificial Intelligence Architect Zhou Jingren, Alibaba Cloud Chief Technology Officer Li Feifei, and Alibaba Group Chief Technology Officer Wu Zeming. (cnbc.com) Wu said the organizational changes were meant to “accelerate” Alibaba’s artificial intelligence development, according to a memo seen by CNBC. Cloud computing has also been one of Alibaba’s faster-growing businesses in recent quarters, giving the company a direct commercial reason to add more in-house computing capacity. (cnbc.com) Alibaba is not the only company building around domestic hardware. In Shenzhen, a 10,000-card computing cluster using Huawei’s Ascend 910C chips went online in late March with 11,000 petaflops of computing power, and nearly 50 organizations had already signed framework agreements for capacity. (scmp.com) That makes Alibaba’s new site part of a wider build-out rather than a one-off launch. The immediate test is whether Alibaba can turn 10,000 Zhenwu chips in Shaoguan into reliable cloud capacity for customers while it scales toward the 100,000-chip target. (cnbc.com)