Alibaba is developing its own AI chips, too

The Chinese e-commerce giant will join a raft of other tech firms in designing its own processors tailored to in-house machine-learnings tasks. It's another sign of China's increasing desire to use its own chips. The news: Alibaba announced that it's building a chip called Ali-NPU--for "neural processing unit"--designed to handle AI tasks like image and video analysis. The firm says its performance will be 10 times that of a CPU or GPU performing the same task. The firm also announced that it has acquired a Hangzhou-based CPU designer called C-SKY.