Alibaba accelerates chips to face restrictions and compete in the AI ​​market

China intensifies its technological career in artificial intelligence with local chips, while Alibaba and other companies look for alternatives to Nvidia.

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• Alibaba He presented a new versatile chip for inference tasks in AI.
• Metax and Change They launched processors such as substitutes for the NVIDIA H20.
• Beijing promotes a fund of USD $ 8.4 billion to strengthen its AI chain.

Promoted by United States restrictions on advanced chip export, China’s main companies are reinforcing their commitment to their own hardware. In the center of this effort appears Alibaba, which announced a new chip with greater versatility for artificial intelligence tasks (AI), designed to compensate for lack of access to processors from Nvidia.

Alibaba, Historically, one of the largest customers of the American manufacturer, now leads a group of companies that seek to fill the void created by regulatory obstacles. According to a report of WSJ, The company confirmed that its cloud division increased income by 26 % during the second quarter, driven by the growing demand for artificial intelligence services.

According to its executive director, Eddie Wu, the strategy of “The most cloud” It represents one of the two main growth engines, next to electronic commerce.

Local competitors: Metax and Cambricon

In parallel, Metax, Shanghai -based, he launched a chip in July capable of replacing the model NVIDIA H20. Its processor, although it consumes more electricity, includes greater memory capacity, which improves its performance in certain inference tasks. The firm announced that it prepares mass production in the coming months.

Another protagonist is Cambricon Technologies, based in Beijing, which registered income for USD $ 247 million between April and June thanks to its chip Siyuan 590. The rebound brought its stock market capitalization to exceed USD $ 87,000 million, although the company requested investors for excessive expectations.

Huawei as an official standard

Huawei It has become the symbol of the state campaign for technological self -sufficiency. Your chips Ascend Integrated into massive systems of 384 units were presented as an alternative of great power, although with high energy consumption. Its founder, Ren Zhengfei, said the results are comparable to the most advanced standards, minimizing concerns about technical limitations.

However, some private companies have avoided adopting the chips of Huawei, arguing that the company competes directly with them in cloud services. In addition, local engineers point out that the processors developed by the company present problems when training AI models, with failures such as overheating or interruptions during extensive executions.

Structural obstacles and state response

The biggest challenge for the Chinese ecosystem remains manufacturing. Local factories depend on old foreign teams and less powerful national machinery, which limits production capacity. To face this gap, Metax It resorts to previous generation technologies and combines smaller chips to compensate for performance.

The central government intensifies its support. At the beginning of 2025, Beijing announced an investment fund of USD $ 8.4 billion aimed at strengthening the entire supply chain in artificial intelligence. The strategy seeks to reduce American manufacturers dependence and give promotion to startups that develop innovative models and hardware.

The rivalry with Nvidia and the future of AI in China

Despite the advances, the distance with Nvidia And other Silicon Valley companies remains wide, especially in large -scale models training. Reports highlight that Alibaba and other firms are concentrated in inference, where technical requirements are less demanding than in training.

However, movements such as Deepseek, startup that develops models comparable to OpenAi, They have generated optimism. The company hinted that its software innovations could take advantage of local chips, which promoted a wave of enthusiasm in Chinese markets.

Analyst Kevin Xu, founder of Interconnected CapitalHe said that these adaptations could allow Chinese developers to reduce the gap with the United States “Before what many believe”challenging the supremacy of Nvidia and American infrastructure both in the domestic and abroad.

Written article with the help of an AI content editor, edited by Angel Di Matteo / Diariobitcoin

Original image of Diariobitcoin, created with artificial intelligence, for free use, licensed under public domain.

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