China's chipmakers upend Beijing's best laid plans

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By Robyn Mak An unexpected challenger is stealing Huawei's thunder. China's designated chip champion on Thursday detailed for the first time its ambitious plans to take on U.S. titan Nvidia NASDAQ:NVDA. At home in the People's Republic, however, Alibaba NYSE:BABA, the $390 billion e-commerce group founded by Jack Ma, and others are rapidly advancing their silicon ambitions too. It opens up a new and unexpected front in the global chip war. Huawei has been leading the country's efforts to be 70% self-sufficient in artificial intelligence chips by 2027 in certain cities. Recently, its efforts to break Nvidia's dominance have gained momentum - with Beijing's help. Authorities have asked companies to stop buying certain products from the U.S. firm, the Financial Times reportedthis week, citing sources, creating a void for Huawei to fill. Market watchdogs have also accused Nvidia of violating China's anti-monopoly law. Huawei's flagship Ascend chips are now used by major state-owned enterprises including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China SSE:601398 and State Grid Corporation of China. On Thursday, besides announcing three new chips over the next three years, Huawei unveiled plans for its next "supernode", or cluster of computers featuring thousands of processors, that it says will be more powerful than Nvidia's comparable system. Yet it's not the only competition the American giant faces in the world's second largest economy. This month state broadcaster CCTV spotlighted a massive data centre built by telecom China Unicom HKEX:762 entirely powered by made-in-China semiconductors. It's a formidable feat, given U.S sanctions and export controls have cut off the People's Republic from advanced chipmaking technology; even more impressive is that Alibaba's chip subsidiary, T-Head, supplied roughly 72% of the 23,000 processors used.Securing such a high-profile contract with a state giant is a huge endorsement for the private-sector firm that was until not long ago at the centre of Beijing's tech crackdown. T-Head, founded just seven years ago, is not even mentioned in Alibaba's latest annual report. Its chips were long seen as for internal use only and mostly cater to its parent's cloud computing division, which directly competes with Huawei. The duo's rivalry, however, now goes beyond the cloud. News of Alibaba's silicon achievements, including the latest CCT...

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