Alibaba's processor division could become a major TSMC customer

Recently IC Insights agency found outthat HiSilicon was one of the top 2020 semiconductor suppliers in terms of revenue in the first quarter of XNUMX. For the first time, a processor developer from China managed to do this. Now, sources say that Alibaba's processor division plans to become one of TSMC's big customers.

In fact, Huawei's rapid progress in the microprocessor segment is one of the reasons for the concern of the US authorities, who since last year have been trying to limit the Chinese giant's access to advanced technologies, the intellectual rights of which are more or less controlled by US companies. According to unofficial data, pressure on Huawei even forced the company to look for an alternative contractor for the production of its HiSilicon brand processors in the face of the Chinese SMIC. It is difficult to say whether other progressively developing companies from China await a similar fate, but they are ready to demonstrate ambitions.

Last year, Alibaba Group's processor division, formerly known as Pingtouge, presented the Hanguang 800 processor for accelerating neural networks, which combined the RISC-V architecture and 17 billion transistors. This processor should not go on sale, since Alibaba is going to use it in its own solutions to accelerate artificial intelligence systems. Given that the development of "cloud" services Alibaba in the coming years ready spend $ 28 billion, then the launch of the production of its own processor for AI systems is only one of the stages in the implementation of this program.

DigiTimes reports that Alibaba's core business is deepening its partnership with both TSMC and Global Unichip to become one of the largest customers for the Taiwanese semiconductor contract manufacturer. The consolidation of the market for such services has led to high competition, and in order to obtain the necessary quotas for the production of processors by TSMC, the Chinese client will have to make a lot of effort. The main thing is that political factors that are already hindering the development of Huawei do not interfere in this process.

Source: 3dnews.ru