Alibaba integrates chip business and establishes Pingtouge Semiconductor Company

Recently, at the ongoing 2018 Alibaba Cloud Conference, Alibaba's CTO and the head of DAMO Academy, Zhang Jianfeng, announced that Alibaba will re-integrate the Zhongtian Microchip Company it previously acquired and the self-developed chip business of DAMO Academy to establish Pingtuhao Semiconductor Co., Ltd.

It is reported that after this integration, Alibaba will implement a strategy of integrating the cloud and self-research in the chip field, and the newly established chip company will mainly focus on the research and development of AI chips and embedded chips in the initial stage.

The newly developed AI chip after the integration will be launched in the second half of 2019 and will be applied in Alibaba's data centers, urban brains, and autonomous driving and other scenarios. In the future, it may be made available for public use through Alibaba Cloud, and AI technology will be used in the cloud for voice recognition and image recognition functions.

According to the introduction, "Pingtao Ge" is the alternative name for the honey badger. The new company chose this name mainly because of the three characteristics of the honey badger: passionate, fearless and intelligent and sturdy. These are also the expectations that Alibaba has for this semiconductor company.

Currently, the team of the DAMO Academy has nearly 100 members. The members have previously worked for semiconductor giants such as Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD. After this integration, the employees of the newly established Pingtao Ge Semiconductor Co., Ltd. are expected to be around 200 to 300 people.