Signage at Hangzhou, China's Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. headquarters on Wednesday, March 24, 2021
GUANGZHOU, China's e-commerce giant Alibaba unveiled a new server chip Tuesday to help boost its cloud computing business, and compete with U.S. competitors like Amazon.
Yitian 710 will be the processor and it will be installed on new servers called Panjiu.
Customers will not be able to directly purchase the chips and servers. Alibaba's cloud computing clients can instead purchase services that are based on this latest technology. These servers can be used for storage and artificial intelligence applications.
The company didn't say when services based upon the most recent chip or server would be available to customers.
Alibaba will not manufacture the semiconductor, but will design it.
This is a growing trend in Chinese companies. Huawei developed its own smartphone chips, and Baidu raised funds this year to start a separate semiconductor business. The same thing has been done by U.S. cloud computing rivals Amazon and Google.
