New chip completes Alibaba's AI 'golden triangle'

Alibaba Group's chip unit Pingtouge quietly launched a high-end artificial intelligence processor called the "Zhenwu 810E" on Thursday.

The self-developed chip completed what industry experts called Alibaba's AI "golden triangle" – combining AI model development at Tongyi Lab, cloud services at Alibaba Cloud and chips from Pingtouge.

Zhenwu 810E is built on a proprietary parallel computing architecture and inter-chip communication technology, supported by a fully in-house software stack. Many charts placed Alibaba's PPU alongside chips from Huawei and the Nvidia.

The chips are already deployed in multiple large-card clusters on Alibaba Cloud, the company said, serving more than 400 customers, including the State Grid of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xpeng Motors and Sina Weibo.

Pingtouge was established in 2018 after Alibaba acquired C-Sky Microsystem, then China's only domestic developer of embedded CPU intellectual property, and folded it into its Damo Academy research arm.

The unit is now regarded as one of the group's core technology businesses.