Jack Ma-backed Ant Group Touts Ai Breakthrough Using Chinese Chips

Ant used domestic chips, including from affiliate Alibaba Group and Huawei Technologies, to train models using the so-called Mixture of Experts machine learning approach, the people said.

It got results similar to those from Nvidia chips like the H800, they said, asking not to be named as the information isn't public. Ant is still using Nvidia for AI development but is now relying mostly on alternatives including from AMD and Chinese chips for its latest models, one of the people said.

The models mark Ant's entry into a race between Chinese and US companies that's accelerated since DeepSeek demonstrated how capable models can be trained for far less than the billions invested by OpenAI and Google. It underscores how Chinese companies are trying to use local alternatives to the most advanced Nvidia semiconductors. While not the most advanced, the H800 is a relatively powerful processor and currently barred by the US from China.

Ant said it cost about C6.35 million yuan R16-million to train one trillion tokens using high-performance hardware, but its optimised approach would cut that down to C5.1-million using lower-specification hardware. Tokens are the units of information that a model ingests in order to learn about the world and deliver useful responses to user queries.

The company plans to leverage the recent breakthrough in the large language models it has developed, Ling-Plus and Ling-Lite, for industrial AI solutions including health care and finance, the people said.