Alibaba has reportedly developed an AI accelerator amid growing pressure from Beijing to curb the nation's reliance on Nvidia GPUs.

First reported by the Wall Street Journal Friday, the ecommerce giant's latest chip is aimed specifically at AI inference, which refers to serving models as opposed to training them.

Alibaba's T-Heat division has been working on AI silicon for some time now. In 2019, it introduced the Hanguang 800. However, unlike modern chips from Nvidia and AMD, the part was primarily aimed at conventional machine learning models like ResNet — not the large language and diffusion models that power AI chatbots and image generators today.

The new chip, it's reported, will be able to handle a more diverse set of workloads. Alibaba has become one of the leading developers of

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