China’s biggest tech corporations have cranked up capital spending on infrastructure for artificial intelligence, according to a report by the Financial Times, which said Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu had doubled expenditure to 50 billion yuan ($7 billion) in the first half, while TikTok parent Bytedance had also boosted AI-spending.
Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu told investors this month the group would “continue to invest in R&D and AI capex to ensure the growth of our AI-driven cloud business” as many clients had great unmet demand. He said “as soon as we get a server up, that server is essentially instantly running at full capacity,” and “we can expect to see a very high ROI [return on investment] over these next quarters.”
Analysts expect US chip designer Nvidia to ship more than 1 million of its H20 processors, which have a reduced power threshold than the group’s leading chips the H100 and its upcoming Blackwell series, because of limits imposed by Washington, while Bytedance was buying hundreds of thousands of H20s for its data centres, while building computing infrastructure in Malaysia.
Read the full report: The FT.
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