Alibaba Group is considering purchasing 40,000 to 50,000 MI308 AI accelerators from AMD, according to people familiar with the matter. The MI308 is an AI chip tailored by AMD for the China market and has received US export approval, though it requires AMD to pay a 15% licensing fee to US authorities. The chip is equipped with 192GB of HBM3 memory and is capable of running long-context inference for 70-billion-parameter large language models on a single card. It is priced at around $12,000, roughly 15% cheaper than NVIDIA’s H20, and has not faced the same security scrutiny. If completed, the deal would mark a major progress for AMD in the Chinese market and provide Chinese AI developers with an additional option for computing power. [Icsmart, in Chinese]
