By Liam Mo and Brenda Goh
BEIJING (Reuters) -Baidu unveiled two new semiconductors for artificial intelligence on Thursday, saying the products can provide Chinese companies with powerful, low-cost and domestically controlled computing power.
Escalating tensions between the United States and China have led to restrictions on exports of advanced U.S. AI chips to Chinese firms, prompting many to develop their own processors or seek domestic alternatives.
The company said at its annual Baidu World technology conference that the M100, an inference-focused chip, is set to be launched in early 2026. The M300, capable of both training and inference, is slated for early 2027.
Training builds AI models by learning patterns from large datasets, while inference uses those models to make predictions and process user requests.
Baidu, which has been developing proprietary chips since 2011, also announced two so-called supernode products. Such products leverage advanced networking capabilities, linking multiple chips and seeking to compensate for limitations in individual chip performance.
Huawei has deployed a similar product called CloudMatrix 384, comprising 384 of its Ascend 910C chips, which industry observers consider more powerful than Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72, one of the U.S. chipmaker’s most advanced system-level products. Huawei also announced in September it would launch more powerful supernode products in coming years.
Baidu’s Tianchi 256, which will be comprised of 256 of its P800 chips, will be available in the first half of next year. Another more souped-up version using 512 of those chips will be launched in the second half.
The company also unveiled a new version of its Ernie large language model, which it said excels not only at text processing, but also image and video analysis.
(Reporting by Liam Mo and Brenda Goh; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
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