Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) yesterday announced a "milestone collaboration" in artificial intelligence (AI) tech with US chip giant Nvidia Corp that the Chinese company said will accelerate its development of humanoid robots.
The news came as Alibaba's shares soared more than nine percent in Hong Kong after chief executive Eddie Wu (吳泳銘) unveiled plans to further ramp up spending on AI.
China and the US are locked in a fierce tech battle, with the California-based AI chip leader Nvidia wound up in their race for supremacy in advanced semiconductors.
Photo: Reuters
Washington restricts Nvidia from exporting its most advanced products — a crucial component in the generative AI revolution — to China.
Alibaba, which runs some of China's biggest online shopping platforms, said it was teaming up with the firm in the field of physical AI.
The Chinese company said its cloud division is integrating "the full suite of the Nvidia physical AI software stack, marking a milestone collaboration" in the domain.
"The initiative provides developers with a comprehensive, cloud-native platform to accelerate advancements in humanoid robotics and physical AI solutions," the company said in a statement.
Alibaba made the announcement in Hangzhou at a subforum of its annual developers' conference, where panellists included executives from Nvidia and Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group (阿里雲智能集團).
Alibaba said in February it would spend at least 380 billion yuan (US$53 billion) on AI and cloud computing over the next three years.
The company's share price soared yesterday after comments made by Wu at the event in Hangzhou.
"We are actively proceeding with the 380 billion investment in AI infrastructure, and plan to add more," he said.
Energy consumed by Alibaba Cloud's global data centres will increase by tenfold by 2032, compared with when generative AI chatbots arrived on the scene in 2022, he added.
China announced plans in March for a trillion-yuan to support tech startups, including those in robotics and AI.
The country is already the world's largest market for industrial robots, official statistics show.
Beijing has expressed national security concerns about Nvidia chips, urging Chinese businesses to rely on local semiconductor suppliers instead.
Last week, Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said he was disappointed by a report that Beijing had barred major Chinese tech firms from buying his company's RTX Pro 6000D chips — state-of-the-art processors made especially for the country.
It came after the US confirmed last month that Nvidia would pay Washington 15 percent of revenue from certain AI chip sales in China.
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