Nvidia Falls On Report Alibaba Designs New AI Chip

Alibaba shares in New York jumped 8% at the start of the U.S. cash session on Friday after the Chinese e-commerce giant reported higher revenue amid China’s AI boom, helping offset an unexpected drop in profits. 

However, the focus isn’t on earnings, but instead on a new report that Alibaba has developed a high-powered chip that could compete with Nvidia. 

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that Alibaba has developed a new AI chip “that is more versatile than its older chips” and could begin “filling the void left after Nvidia ran into regulatory barriers to selling its products in China.” 

The news has dragged NVDA down almost 3%…

Washington continues to block sales of Nvidia’s most advanced chips and to prevent Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. from fabricating Chinese AI processors on cutting-edge machines.

Related:

• Nvidia Halts China-Specific H20 AI Chip Production, Information Says

As a result, domestic Chinese tech firms such as Alibaba are developing substitutes for Nvidia’s H20 chip, the most powerful AI processor still permitted for sale in China.

Here’s more color on Alibaba’s new chip: 

• Designed for AI inference – not training – making it useful for applications like chatbots, voice assistants, and recommendation systems, which don’t need the top power of Nvidia’s Blackwell or H100 chips.

• Unlike previous Alibaba chips, this one is a general-purpose chip, capable of supporting a broad range of AI inference tasks.

• Designed to work with the Nvidia software ecosystem, easing developer adoption.

• Domestically built – an essential step for China toward more localized production. 

Earlier this week, Alibaba rolled out its own open-source video generating model, part of a series of new upgrades that span the gamut from agentic AI services to chatbots. This comes days before the WSJ report. 

This new chip is seen as a source of increased competition for Huawei Technologies and Nvidia. Shares of Nvidia were down 3% in the early U.S. cash session. 

Meanwhile:

• Nvidia Slides After Data Center Revenues Miss, Solid Guidance Fails To Wow Bulls

Must read:

• As China’s Nvidia Explodes Higher, Beijing’s Latest Stock Bubble Is Only Just Starting

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