China's BAT Firms Strike Deal to Buy AI Chips From Nvidia for Cloud Services
Qian Tongxin
DATE:  Sep 27 2017
/ SOURCE:  Yicai
China's BAT Firms Strike Deal to Buy AI Chips From Nvidia for Cloud Services China's BAT Firms Strike Deal to Buy AI Chips From Nvidia for Cloud Services

(Yicai Global) Sept. 27 -- Chinese tech giants Baidu Inc. [NASDAQ:BIDU], Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. [NYSE:BABA] and Tencent Holdings Ltd. [HKG:0700], collectively referred to as BAT, have agreed deals with Nvidia Corp.[NASDAQ:NVDA] to procure artificial intelligence GPU chips for their respective cloud services units, Jensen Huang, Nvidia president, said during a keynote speech at the GPU Technology Conference held in Beijing on Sept. 26.

GPU stands for graphics processing unit.

Nvidia, which traditionally makes games console chips, has laid an emphasis on expanding into artificial intelligence.

"AI is the most important technology development of our time" Huang said. "As the world's leading cloud providers deploy the world's best AI platform, with Volta GPUs and Nvidia software, we'll see amazing breakthroughs in medicine, autonomous transportation, precision manufacturing and much more."

Nvidia is also working with China's e-commerce giant JD.com Inc. [NASDAQ:JD] on the development of UAVs and robots, Huang said during the speech.

JD.com's drones, to be equipped with Nvidia's unmanned GPU Jetson chip, will provide delivery services in remote areas, while driverless delivery vans will initially be used in the urban areas.

The firm's cooperation with BAT bears some resemblance to deals it has made in the US with major cloud service providers, such as Amazon.com Inc. [NASDAQ:AMZN], Microsoft Corp. [NASDAQ:MSFT], Alphabet Inc.'s [NASDAQ:GOOG] Google and Facebook Inc. [NASDAQ:FB].

Google Cloud Platform will use Nvidia's latest Cloud GPU chip, the P100 GPU beta, the company said recently.

Follow Yicai Global on
Keywords:   NVIDIA,GPU Chips,AI,Baidu,TENCENT,Alibaba,JD.com,Cloud Computing