Jack Ma-backed Ant Group touts AI breakthrough using Chinese chips

Chinese chips are being used by Ant Group Co., a financial services company supported by billionaire Jack Ma, to reduce artificial intelligence (AI) model training expenses by 20%. These chips are from Huawei Technologies Co. and affiliate Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. According to the article, the outcomes were even comparable to those of Nvidia Corp. chips, such as the H800.

Ant is training the models with a machine learning technique known as Mixture of Experts. Although it still uses Nvidia for AI development, its most recent models now mostly rely on chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and other Chinese manufacturers.

This is Ant's first foray into the AI race between US and Chinese companies, which has intensified since DeepSeek showed that powerful models could be trained for a fraction of the billions that OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.'s Google have committed.