Ant Group, backed by Alibaba’s Jack Ma, has announced that it has used Chinese-made semiconductors to train AI models that would cut costs by 20%. Ant Group, formerly Ant Financial and the owner of Alipay, the world’s largest digital payment platform, used Chinese chips, including from affiliate Alibaba Group and Huawei Technologies, to train models using the so-called Mixture of Experts machine learning approach.(That technique divides tasks into smaller sets of data, very much like having a team of specialists who each focus on a segment of a job.) The results are similar to those from last-generation-but-one Nvidia (NVDA) chips like the H800. (The U.S. government has barred exports of H800 chips to China.)
The models are Ant’s entry into a race between Chinese and U.S. AI companies set off when China’s DeepSeek demonstrated models that can be trained for far less than the billions invested by U.S. companies such as OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google. Ant published a research paper this month that claimed its models at times outperformed those from Meta Platforms (META) on specific benchmarks.
The news is likely to be enough to keep China’s AI stock rally at a healthy boil. Yesterday I added shares of Tencent (TCEHY) and the iShares China Large-Cap ETF (FXI) to my portfolios at least partly on the strength of China’s AI rally.Today, March 25, I’m adding shares of Alibaba (BABA) to my Jubak Picks and Volatility portfolios.
