Alibaba-affiliate Ant combines Chinese and U.S. chips to slash AI development costs

cnbc.com:

BEIJING — Alibaba-affiliate Ant Group is using both Chinese and U.S.-made semiconductors for building more efficient artificial intelligence models, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The combination of chips not only reduces the time and cost of training AI models, but also limits reliance on a single supplier such as Nvidia, the source said, noting the industry trend of tapping multiple networks, known as mixture of experts — a technique that allows models to be trained with much less compute.

The company earlier this month said in a paper it was able to use lower-cost hardware to effectively train its own MoE models, reducing computing costs by 20%.

Ant operates Alipay, one of the two major apps for mobile payments in China. Jack Ma founded the company and its affiliate, Alibaba.

Bloomberg reported Monday, citing sources, that Ant has used chips from Alibaba and Huawei for training AI models. Ant also used Nvidia chips but now relies more on alternatives from Advanced Micro Devices and Chinese chips, according to the Bloomberg report.

Ant did declined CNBC's request for comment.

The company on Monday announced «major upgrades» to its AI solutions for healthcare, which it said were being used by seven major hospitals and healthcare institutions in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Ningbo.

The healthcare AI model is built on DeepSeek's R1 and V3 models, Alibaba's Qwen and Ant's own BaiLing. Ant's healthcare-specific model is able to answer questions about medical topics, and can also help improve patient services, according to the company statement.

The U.S. has sought to restrict China's AI development by limiting Chinese businesses' access to the most advanced semiconductors used for training models.