China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has set up its own semiconductor manufacturing business and will soon begin building its own chips for artificial intelligence workloads, with further plans to build quantum processors down the road.

The news was revealed Wednesday by Alibaba Chief Technology Officer Jeff Zhang during a press conference at the company’s Cloud Computing Conference 2018 in Hangzhou. The executive laid out an ambitious roadmap driven by the company’s DAMO Academy, which is its research and development arm, the Nikkei Asian Review reported.

The roadmap proposes that Alibaba will launch its first in-house AI chips by the second half of next year. The chip, which is currently under development, will be called AliNPU and is designed to process AI tasks such as image, video and voice analysis and will be used for tasks such as autonomous driving, smart cities and smart logistics, Zhang said.

“We want to strengthen our data-processing capabilities,” Zhang said. “By the end of the year, we’ll be able to see Alibaba’s first neural network chip. In our current tests, it is able to increase our image processing capabilities by fourfold.”

ZDNet reported that Alibaba’s new semiconductor business will be called Pingtouge, and will focus on the manufacture of the AI chips and also embedded processors for “internet of things” devices.

Alibaba certainly has the capability to build its own chips following its acquisition in April of an integrated circuit design company called Hangzhou C-Sky Microsystems. At the time of that acquisition, Alibaba said it was an important step in boosting its chipmaking abilities.

“It’s not as hard as it seems to build a specialized AI chip these days as it’s primarily a math matrix function,” Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategies, told SiliconANGLE. “It’s harder to build a multifunction chip like a CPU, GPU or FPGA. The most difficult part is programming the AI chip.”

Alibaba isn’t the only Chinese company that’s intending to build its own AI-specific hardware. The country’s biggest internet search provider, Baidu Inc., is planning to release its own “Kunlun” AI chip later this year. Both moves would seem to indicate that China’s biggest technology firms are keen to help their government, which has previously said it wants to move away from its dependence on foreign-built technology.

Alibaba’s DAMO Academy, meanwhile, will also double down on its efforts to develop a quantum processor. During the press briefing, Zhang said the idea was to build cloud-accessed, quantum-classical heterogeneous systems capable of delivering quantum computing power as a utility which can then be used for machine learning, optimization and physics simulations.

“We have to leverage Alibaba’s advantage, not only to develop chips, but also the system and environments to test and apply it, using Alibaba’s platforms, artificial intelligence and computing power, to develop quantum technologies to their full potential,” Zhang said.

Image: ColiNOOB/Pixabay