China’s Alibaba is ramping up its push into leading-edge technologies, developing superfast quantum computers and aiming to have its first artificial intelligence chips on the market next year.
The move illustrates how the arms race in AI between the US and China is playing out in the corporate field: Alibaba’s march tracks that of US giants such as IBM.
China’s tech companies have also been spooked into greater-self reliance by the trade war and other moves in the US, where they are big buyers of chips from the likes of Qualcomm and Intel. Washington, irked at what it sees as intellectual property theft and broader fears of China’s growing technological prowess, is clamping down on sales of tech assets and tightening up on joint ventures.