00:00Alibaba shares are jumping after the company rolled out what it says is the most powerful AI chip in China.
00:06Let's discuss that and more with Bloomberg tech host Ed Ludlow.
00:09Ed, it is quite the transformation that Alibaba has come on from e-commerce giant to now producing a chip
00:14it says rivals NVIDIA.
00:17Yeah, and the U.S. ADRs reflect that this is a meaningful breakthrough, right?
00:21So we're talking about the Genwoo V900 chip.
00:24It's interesting because Alibaba's chip unit, T-Head, has quite, with some regular cadence, put out different generations of chip.
00:31This latest one, the V900, has about 3x the performance of a chip they only released three or four months
00:38ago.
00:39There is no kind of apples to apples comparison of how this generation of accelerator will perform against, say, NVIDIA.
00:48You know, what NVIDIA is or is not allowed to ship to Alibaba on mainland China is still not firm.
00:53But the main point, and, like, within the administration, for example, in the United States and within industry,
00:59something that's been acknowledged for quite a long time, we've done reporting on this,
01:02is what the Chinese technology companies are really good at is even if at the single chip accelerator level,
01:07it's not as strong as, say, NVIDIA's Blackwell generation.
01:11They are very good at juicing out performance in aggregate in the form of a cluster.
01:16So the whole point with V900 is that it's designed for training in a cluster of, say, 500,000 chips.
01:22And so for Barbar, this is them taking their destiny into their own hands,
01:27much the same way that the hyperscalers in this country have focused on diversifying compute through custom silicon.
01:33So, Ed, we know, like, the global foundry situation is somewhat constrained.
01:37Now, when we look at the domestic situation in China, you know,
01:40what do we want to think about how quickly these can kind of roll out or what's the sort of,
01:43you know,
01:43as the rubber hits the road situation?
01:45It sounds like a great advancement, and I don't think we should all be surprised.
01:48But generally speaking, you know, how are they looking in the foundry front to actually roll it out?
01:52Yeah.
01:53So it's one of these situations where it's important to say we just don't know.
01:56Alibaba, in this context, is the fabulous chip maker.
01:59They designed the chip, the V900.
02:01They have not said whether SMIC, the domestic chip manufacturer, is manufacturing this semiconductor or not.
02:07We just don't know.
02:08But the story more broadly has been that at a capacity level and a process level,
02:14even though SMIC is emerging as a national champion, it's trying to catch up,
02:17it is not at the leading edge as TSMC.
02:21And so those are unknowns and imponderables at this point.
02:25But that's the calculus.
02:26So let's do this.
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