HPC News Bytes – 20260928

Alibaba used its AppSara conference last week in Hangzhou, China, to unveil the Zhenwu V900 Accelerator.

The company said its next flagship model will have 5 to 10 trillion parameters and set a target of more than 20 gigawatts of cloud capacity by 2032.

All that came during President Xi Jinping's September

23 to 25 state

visit to the U.S. last week.

held during the UN General Assembly week.

AI was part of the US-China discussions, and the two sides subsequently agreed to establish an AI dialogue.

The UN Security Council separately discussed AI and international security with Chinese and US AI companies represented.

Alibaba is one part of a much broader Chinese advanced computing effort.

Huawei, Baidu, and its subsidiary, Hunlun Xin, Chinese Academy of Sciences, referred to as CAS, and the Sugan Haiguan ecosystem.

And of course, Lineshine, now number one on the top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

At the chip manufacturing level, there is SMIC and increasingly Shanghai Wali, China's answers to TSMC.

alongside efforts in domestic lithography ranging from immersion DUV, meaning deep ultraviolet technology, to a reported extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, prototype, which to date only Allen-based ASML has and is under an export ban to China.

Yeah, getting access to the leading-edge chip fabrication remains the big structural weakness in technology for China.

So its strategy naturally seems to be to focus on areas where it does have access to similar capabilities or even parity, and then steadily build domestic know-how.

If your processors are behind, throw more processors at the workload.

Improve the interconnect and packaging.

Squeeze more utilization out of them through software.

Use CPUs wherever you can so you don't need GPUs.

and co-designed the model and machine together to get more efficiency.

We covered Lineshine, the CPU-only ARM-based number one system on the top 500.

This happened a few months ago, which demonstrated that China can scale a domestic architecture to the very top, although potentially at a considerable cost in power and efficiency.

In parallel, they have added more players and more redundancy across the stack.

Alibaba, Huawei, Baidu, and Hygon provide different compute paths.

SMIC and Wall-E provide more than one advanced manufacturing path, and their efforts in advanced lithography target the hardest remaining choke point.

Alibaba used its AppSara conference last week in Hangzhou, China, to unveil the Zhenwu V900 Accelerator.

The company said its next flagship model will have 5 to 10 trillion parameters and set a target of more than 20 gigawatts of cloud capacity by 2032.

All that came during President Xi Jinping's September

23 to 25 state

visit to the U.S. last week.

held during the UN General Assembly week.

AI was part of the US-China discussions, and the two sides subsequently agreed to establish an AI dialogue.

The UN Security Council separately discussed AI and international security with Chinese and US AI companies represented.

Alibaba is one part of a much broader Chinese advanced computing effort.

Huawei, Baidu, and its subsidiary, Hunlun Xin, Chinese Academy of Sciences, referred to as CAS, and the Sugan Haiguan ecosystem.

And of course, Lineshine, now number one on the top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

At the chip manufacturing level, there is SMIC and increasingly Shanghai Wali, China's answers to TSMC.

alongside efforts in domestic lithography ranging from immersion DUV, meaning deep ultraviolet technology, to a reported extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, prototype, which to date only Allen-based ASML has and is under an export ban to China.

Yeah, getting access to the leading-edge chip fabrication remains the big structural weakness in technology for China.

So its strategy naturally seems to be to focus on areas where it does have access to similar capabilities or even parity, and then steadily build domestic know-how.

If your processors are behind, throw more processors at the workload.

Improve the interconnect and packaging.

Squeeze more utilization out of them through software.

Use CPUs wherever you can so you don't need GPUs.

and co-designed the model and machine together to get more efficiency.

We covered Lineshine, the CPU-only ARM-based number one system on the top 500.

This happened a few months ago, which demonstrated that China can scale a domestic architecture to the very top, although potentially at a considerable cost in power and efficiency.

In parallel, they have added more players and more redundancy across the stack.

Alibaba, Huawei, Baidu, and Hygon provide different compute paths.

SMIC and Wall-E provide more than one advanced manufacturing path, and their efforts in advanced lithography target the hardest remaining choke point.