Alibaba Comes Back Strong Against US Sanctions; To Power 20% Operations By In-House CPUs By 2025

Alibaba Group Holding Limited BABA plans to power 20% of its operations with its homebrew CPUs by 2025, the Register reports.

Alibaba showcased its Yitian 710 server-class CPU in 2021. In early 2022 the operation started trials of the devices and offered more info about their specs. 

The features included 128 Armv9-compatible CPU cores, a clock speed of up to 3.2GHz, eight DDR5 channels, and 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes, all cooked up on a 5nm process.

At its Aspara conference on October 3 and Chinese social media, Alibaba revealed the CPUs have already been pressed into service "on a large scale in the Alibaba Cloud datacenter," where they're powering workloads for Alibaba "and many internet technology companies."

However, the operation should possess plenty of the open-source software its customers need and port Alibaba Cloud's code to Softbank Group Corp SFTBF SFTBY Arm architecture and proven to work at scale. 

As amply demonstrated by Microsoft Corp MSFT Azure, Oracle Corp ORCL Cloud, and Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL Google Cloud adopting Ampere CPUs for some of their servers, plenty of functional code is already Arm-ready.

Yet none of those clouds, nor Amazon.com Inc AMZN AWS with its homebrew Graviton silicon, have set a 20% Arm target.

Considering the U.S.'s technology access sanctions on China, Alibaba Cloud's shift to Yitian looks driven as much by necessity as innovation.

Now, all it needs is alternative sources of GPUs. Alibaba Cloud boasts a 30% cost and performance boost and 60% energy savings compared to its x86 fleet.

Alibaba's cloud computing unit opened a new campus covering an area of 198,200 square meters (2.1 million sq ft) in its home city of Hangzhou.

Price Action: BABA shares traded higher by 9.23% at $71.22 in the premarket on the last check Friday.

Photo by Fooksou Lamimo via Wikimedia Commons