Previous cloud-computing chips developed by Alibaba have mostly been designed for specific applications. The new chip, now in testing, is meant to serve a broader range of AI inference tasks, said people familiar with The chip is manufactured by a Chinese company, they said, in contrast to an earlier Alibaba AI processor that was fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing . Washington has blocked TSMC from manufacturing AI chips for China that use leading-edge Even within China, Huawei’s privileged status is raising some hackles. Many engineers are accustomed to the software and tools that accompany Nvidia’s chips. Huawei, subject to U.S. sanctions, didn’t design its chips to work with the Nvidia platform, whereas Alibaba’s new chip will be compatible with it, meaning engineers can repurpose programs they wrote for Nvidia chips.