The tech giant has become China's second firm to develop a high-end chip for cloud services, joining Huawei.
A product of Alibaba's (BABA:NYSE) DAMO ("Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook") Academy, among other research arms, processor Yitian 710 was announced at the Apsara Conference on October 19, 2021.,
The company has recently improved its R&D capabilities through acquiring SKY microsystems and making several strategic investments. Its first AI inference chip Hanguang 800 that was introduced in 2019 is now heavily used in Alibaba Cloud's data centers.
The new device – Yitian 710 – is based on the Arm architecture and features 128 cores.
"Customizing our own server chips is consistent with our ongoing efforts toward boosting our computing capabilities with better performance and improved energy efficiency," stated Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and head of the DAMO Academy. "We plan to use the chips to support current and future businesses across the Alibaba Group ecosystem."