In a significant move within the AI infrastructure landscape, Google has appointed Amin Vahdat as its chief technologist for AI infrastructure, a newly minted role that underscores the importance of AI development at the company. This elevation not only highlights Vahdat’s pivotal contributions over the past 15 years but also signals Google’s commitment to maintaining its competitive edge in the rapidly evolving AI sector, especially as it invests heavily in capital expenditures.

In a significant move for the tech industry, Alibaba has developed a new AI chip designed to address the growing demand for versatile AI inference tasks, especially in light of Nvidia’s regulatory challenges in China. This new chip, currently in testing, is being manufactured by a local Chinese company, marking a shift from Alibaba’s previous reliance on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing for its AI processors. As the largest cloud-computing company in China, Alibaba’s advancements in AI chip technology come at a crucial time when domestic firms are striving to reduce dependency on foreign technology.