To help make China a self-reliant “technology superpower,” the ruling Chinese Communist Party is pushing the world’s biggest e-commerce company to take on the tricky, expensive business of designing its own processor chips a business unlike anything Alibaba Group (阿里巴巴) has done before.
Its 3-year-old chip unit, T-Head, unveiled its third processor in October, the Yitian 710 for Alibaba’s cloud computing business. Alibaba says for now, it has no plans to sell the chip to outsiders.
Other rookie chip developers including Tencent (騰訊), a games and social media giant, and smartphone brand Xiaomi (小米) are pledging billions of dollars in line
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced today that Canada will launch a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. No federal government officials will attend the games but athletes will still be allowed to compete.
Search giant Baidu Inc (百度) and Toyota Motor Corp-backed Pony.ai Inc (小馬智行) were granted the first batch of licenses from Beijing regulators to start open-road autonomous commercial driving operations in a part of the city equivalent to the size of Manhattan.
The pilot licenses will allow a fleet of about 100 cars from the two companies to travel around the 60km2 so-called Beijing High-level Automated Driving Demonstration Area, about a 30-minute drive from Tiananmen Square, state media reports said.
Baidu received 67 of the permits and will allow its robotaxis to range between more than 600 pickup and dropoff points from 7am