Alibaba announces semiconductor company, to launch Ali-NPU neural network chip next year

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba Group announced on September 19 that it will set up a brand new semiconductor company to deepen the group's layout in chip making filed. The new company's name, Pingtouge Semiconductor Company, cites a Chinese nickname for the honey badger. 

According to Alibaba's chief technology officer Zhang Jianfeng, the group will integrate businesses of Hangzhou C-SKY Microsystems Co., Ltd, a chip company wholly acquired by Alibaba in April, and the chip R&D team of Alibaba DAMO Academy into the new semiconductor company.

The new chip company's first product will be the neural network chip dubbed Ali-NPU, which was announced by DAMO Academy in April. Alibaba said the Ali-NPU chip could be used in image and video analysis and machine learning. The chip is set to be launched in the second half of 2019 and will be first employed in such cloud data scenarios as the Alibaba data center, the City Brain and autonomous driving, etc.

Alibaba has previously made several investments in chipmakers. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, revealed that the group has invested in 5 semiconductor firms in the past 4 years, namely, Cambricon, Barefoot Networks, DeePhi Tech, Kneron and ASR Microelectronics.

Alibaba takes chip development as one of its most important research topics. The group intends to plow a total of RMB 100 billion within 3 years in various AI sectors, such as quantum computing, machine learning, basic algorithm, visual computing, natural language processing, next-generation human-machine interaction, chip making and sensor technologies.

Aside from AI chip, the R&D of quantum computing is another priority for DAMO Academy. Zhang Jianfeng disclosed that DAMO Academy will complete a quantum computing lab soon and is expected to deliver a standard quantum chip over the next two or three years.