Alibaba and China Telecom are launching a major data centre in Shaoguan, Guangdong, to accelerate the country’s focus on homegrown artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The launch, which has been reported by multiple media outlets, establishes a new facility just north of the Greater Bay Area that will be owned and operated by China Telecom.
The centre underscores how China’s biggest technology firms are advancing their own AI semiconductor technology as Beijing intensifies its push for self-sufficiency. This effort has been hastened by restrictions imposed by the U.S. on China’s access to key semiconductor technology, including AI chips from Nvidia, which has spurred the development of domestic alternatives.
The Shaoguan facility will initially feature 10,000 of Alibaba’s proprietary Zhenwu semiconductors. These chips are engineered for AI training and inferencing, and have the capability to support AI models that are the size of hundreds of billions of parameters, putting them among some of the largest models available. The computing cluster is intended for use in key industries, including healthcare and advanced materials.
[See more: Chinese team makes breakthrough in fibre-wireless data speeds]
Alibaba, a major cloud computing player headquartered in Hangzhou, has been actively designing its own chips and developing its own AI models, which it then sells through its rapidly growing cloud computing division.
Further organisational changes announced on Tuesday signal Alibaba’s commitment to this area, with CEO Eddie Wu heading a new technology committee. Chief AI Architect Zhou Jingren, Chief Technology Officer of Alibaba Cloud Li Feifei, and chief technology officer for Alibaba Group Wu Zeming will also serve on the committee, CNBC reports. These shifts were made to “accelerate” the company’s AI development.
The Shaoguan data centre is part of a wider national focus on building large-scale data centres using domestic technology, following last month’s activation of a computing cluster built with Huawei’s advanced Ascend 910C AI chips.
