Reports have emerged that Ant Group, a financial affiliate of Alibaba, has developed a technology to train artificial intelligence (AI) models using Chinese-made semiconductors.
According to a Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources on the 24th local time, Ant Group used semiconductors made by domestic companies, including Alibaba and telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei, for AI model training.
Ant Group trained the AI models using the so-called "Mixture of Experts" (MoE) approach, and it was reported that they achieved results similar to those obtained using Nvidia's H800 semiconductors.
Using this technology, the training expense is said to be reduced by about 20% compared to using the expensive products from American Nvidia. Training 1 trillion tokens with high-performance hardware costs approximately 6.35 million yuan (about 1.28 billion won), but utilizing Ant Group's method lowers the expense to 5.1 million yuan (about 1.03 billion won).
Ant Group still uses Nvidia products for AI model development, but sources noted that it is increasingly using chips made by American semiconductor corporations AMD and Chinese companies in the latest models.
Bloomberg noted that "after Chinese startup DeepSeek demonstrated the ability to train AI models at a significantly lower expense than America's OpenAI or Google, Ant Group has entered the intensifying AI industry competition between China and the U.S."