Consultants say Alibaba’s AI Chip might additionally deal with the shortcomings of Huawei’s 910B and 910C AI chips, as the brand new chip is predicted to be suitable with Nvidia’s CUDA and PyTorch ecosystems.
“Nvidia’s dominance isn’t simply in its {hardware}; it’s in its strong software program ecosystem, notably CUDA. A seamless compatibility layer would permit builders to simply port their current code, bypassing the steep studying curve related to new, fragmented hyperscalar software program stacks from home rivals like Huawei’s MindSpore or Baidu’s PaddlePaddle. The software program growth and optimization on customized chips are the key bottleneck,” mentioned Neil Shah, vp at Counterpoint Analysis.
Geopolitical pressures, home technique
Alibaba has been utilizing Nvidia’s AI chips for a very long time, however growing US export restrictions over the previous few years have prompted Alibaba to speed up its home semiconductor technique.
In October 2022, the US imposed restrictions on superior semiconductors exported to China. To this, Nvidia and AMD responded by cutting down the GPU variations, tailor-made to remain inside export compliance. However later, even these chips confronted licensing limitations.
In April this yr, underneath President Donald Trump’s administration, Nvidia was knowledgeable about securing an export license to promote its H20 processor in China. Barely three months later, the US administration introduced the resumption of the gross sales of H20 AI chips to China as a part of a uncommon earth crucial minerals deal. Later, China’s Our on-line world Administration (CAC) summoned Nvidia representatives concerning severe safety points associated to potential monitoring and distant shutdown capabilities embedded within the H20 chips.
“In 2023, Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai, after blaming uncertainties created by US export restrictions on superior computing chips for halting Alibaba’s cloud unit’s spinoff, made a daring imaginative and prescient about the way it will deal with the setback. He targeted on growing a sustainable development mannequin primarily based on rising AI-driven demand for networked and extremely scaled cloud computing companies,” Faruqui mentioned. The brand new AI chip by Alibaba, he mentioned, is the end result of this sustainable development mannequin to counter US sanctions.