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AI is the new avenue for faceoffs between global tech giants, and where Alibaba and Chinese firms broadly have made significant strides in the recent past.
Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd (BABA) unit Ant Group is using a new technique that combines semiconductors from American and Chinese firms to train artificial intelligence (AI) models and is seeing breakthrough results, according to a Bloomberg report on Monday.
Ant used chips from Alibaba and Huawei Technologies to train models using the so-called Mixture of Experts (MoE) machine learning approach, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the matter.
The results were similar to those from Nvidia Corp's (NVDA) H800, the report said. The H800 is a China-specific variant of Nvidia’s H100 graphic processing unit, designed to comply with U.S. export restrictions.
H100 was Nvidia’s previous-generation flagship for AI workloads before the H200 and now the Blackwell B200 series, but is still widely used in the industry.
While Ant still uses Nvidia's old chips, it is now relying more on chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) and Chinese manufacturers.
Alibaba's Hong Kong shares (9988), which hit an over three-year high on March 18, rose 2.1% just before the closing bell.
Ant earlier this month said in a paper that it was able to use lower-cost hardware to effectively train its own MoE models, at 20% lower computing cost.
AI is the new avenue for faceoffs between global tech giants, and where Alibaba and Chinese firms broadly have made significant strides in the recent past.
The emergence of DeepSeek at the start of the year challenged the status quo when it claimed that one of its AI models was developed at a fraction of the cost it took to create comparative American models.
That further fanned concerns that the Chinese AI was developing despite U.S. restrictions.
Meanwhile, Alibaba has rolled out new AI features, including its Qwen series, and is advancing AI developments across business units at a steep pace. That has supported its earnings and stock in recent months.
On Stocktwits, retail sentiment for BABA was 'bearish', with low message volume.
A user remarked that China perhaps waited for Donald Trump to become president before releasing positive news every week — a reference to Chinese businesses' advances in AI.
Another said that a fresh high for the stock could be on the horizon.
BABA is up 66.6% year to date and is one of the top gainers among U.S. stocks in this period.
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