Alibaba Cloud plans to use fewer Western chips, to boost its already huge AI margins

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Cloudy AI is Chinese giant’s ‘most certain’ path to growth as e-commerce slows

Alibaba has revealed margins from its cloudy AI operation are rising so quickly it will be able to achieve return on investment for new hardware purchases faster than previously planned.

Speaking on the company’s earnings call yesterday, CFO Toby Xusaid the company runs its servers for five years, and that AI servers produce enough revenue to cover their costs in three years. In the fourth and fifth years of a server’s life, the machines therefore generate free cash flow. CEO Eddie Wu said some servers deliver cash for longer, and said machines acquired in 2018 and 2020 – and packing the Nvidia V100 and A100 accelerators – “are still being used by customers at near full capacity.”

Alibaba thinks it can shorten the initial payback period for AI hardware to 2.5 years, because margins for AI...

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Quote of the day by Motorola's cell phone pioneer Martin Cooper: 'People want to talk to other people — not a house, or an office, or a car' — blueprinting the start of a new era of communications

The American engineer Mark Cooper is considered one of the leading pioneers of the wireless communications industry, envisioning a world in which people would communicate wherever they were and not from fixed locations. Without his work in the mid-20th century, the mobile communications industry would arguably be non-existent. Hello Moto