Alibaba partners with Nvidia for «physical AI» training software

Nvidia chips are as good as banned in China, but that doesn’t stop the internet giant Alibaba from partnering with the chip supplier — and see its stocks surge 10%.

Alibaba recently decided to «double down» on AI, according to this Reuters report, and promised $53 billion in AI infrastructure investments during the next three years – with even more coming.

Nvidia is slated to help develop physical AI functions like data synthesis, model training, environmental simulation and validation testing, Reuters says.

Nvidia is pretty big in robotics
Physical AI screams robots, and that is a hot property in China these days, with everyone rushing to make a functional and cheap humanoid that is actually usable — and they’ve gotten quite good at it.

More practically, this means that Alibaba will be integrating Nvidia’s Physical AI software that can make 3D replicas out of real world environments or synthesized ones, that is incredbily useful for training self-driving cars or robots, they say in their press release.

Alibaba is also slated to open new data centers all over the world. They are advancing in Brazil, France and the Netherlands, according to Reuters — and have plans for Mexico, Japan, South Kore, Malaysia and Dubai on the table for the «coming years.»

Alibaba does not say wether any of these will be using chips from Nvidia, though, as China recently banned them in the country in favor of producing their own, homegrown ones.

Read more: The full report on Reuters, Alibaba’s press release and a writeup on TechCrunch.