The news comes as U.S. officials voiced national security concerns at trade talks with China in Madrid this week, aiming to block shipments of chips and other advanced technology.
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Amid the tension China has grown increasingly keen for domestic firms to switch to homegrown chips, warning them against use of those made by U.S. giant Nvidia, on security grounds.
China Unicom’s $390-million data centre, in Xining, the capital of the western province of Qinghai, will possess computing capacity of 20,000 petaflops when complete, the provincial government says on its website.
So far the centre has built 3,579 petaflops using nearly 23,000 domestically made AI chips, CCTV images showed on Tuesday.
The company plans to procure additional chips from Tecorigin (Wuxi), Moore Threads, and Enflame, CCTV said.
Alibaba’s T-Head has also developed an AI chip called the PPU that features 96 gigabytes of memory and HBM2e, a type of vertically stacked DRAM chip specially designed for AI semiconductors.
China Unicom, Alibaba, Biren, MetaX, Enflame, Tecorigin and Zhonghao Xinying did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. Moore Threads declined to comment.
On Monday, Beijing said a preliminary investigation of Nvidia found it had violated anti-monopoly laws.
($1=7.1071 yuan)
Reporting by Che Pan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Clarence Fernandez
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Brenda Goh is Reuters’ Shanghai bureau chief and oversees coverage of corporates in China. Brenda joined Reuters as a trainee in London in 2010 and has reported stories from over a dozen countries.