ASIA BUSINESS OUTLOOK9FEBRUARYNEWSROOMNEUTRADC EXPANDS REGIONAL FOOTPRINT WITH ISHIKARI PARTNERSHIPAlibaba Group unveiled its chip design company's first AI chip, the Zhenwu 810E, in mid-April. This significant step forward helps to grow China's capability to develop domestic AI computing capabilities.Zhenwu 810E is a new parallel-processing unit designed to run workloads for AI inference and AI training. The Zhenwu 810E supports 96 gigabytes (gb) of high-bandwidth memory (HBM2e), which gives it approximately 700gb/sec of memory bandwidth, placing it in performance range that is competitive with NVIDIA's H20 GPU.The Zhenwu 810E is already in use in Alibaba Cloud's data centers and has been deployed across multiple external customers' enterprise data centers, demonstrating the Zhenwu 8100's commercial viability, scalability, and ability to operate in data centers.In September 2025 the Zhenwu 810E was publicly demonstrated for the first time during China Central Television (CCTV) benchmark testing against NVIDIA's H20 and A800 processors.The Zhenwu 810E was launched during an overall Chinese push to develop a home-grown semiconductor ecosystem to reduce their dependency on foreign vendors amidst ongoing US export restrictions against advanced AI chips.Following the announcement, Alibaba Holdings' stock on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange remained unchanged at HKD 173.30 on January 29th. NeutraDC and Ishikari Renewable Energy Data Center No.1 have come together to create a way to grow digital infrastructure and advanced computing technology throughout Singapore, Indonesia, and Hokkaido, Japan, with the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU).Through this partnership, NeutraDC will help accommodate Ishikari's customers through its colocation services at NeutraDC's data centers in Singapore and Indonesia. Meanwhile, Ishikari will connect NeutraDC to their all-photonics network, providing access to a point of presence within NeutraDC's network across the regions of Hokkaido, Tokyo, Singapore, and Indonesia.As the only port into Japan's renewable energy ecosystem, NeutraDC views Hokkaido as an opportunity to further develop and explore data center locations within the Ishikari geographical region.Additionally, the two parties will collaborate to develop cross-border GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) offerings, with NeutraDC responsible for the architecture and operational execution of AI systems.The project will also coincide with Ishikari's standalone power data center beginning in April 2026, supported by the Japan government's grants. Both parties will target enterprise data center tenants and GPU users in the markets of Singapore and Indonesia with workloads being hosted and processed from Hokkaido, thus supporting regional scalability for AI purposes.With the amount of data flowing across borders, compliance with Clark of Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act and Indonesia's Personal Data Protection Law is essential. Technology to support compliance and governance programs will be in place to ensure effective data protection across borders and between data center tenants. ALIBABA'S T-HEAD LAUNCHES ZHENWU 810E AI PROCESSOR· Alibaba T-Head unveils Zhenwu 810E AI chip for training and inference workloads.· Chip offers 96GB HBM2e memory and 700GB/s bandwidth, rivaling Nvidia H20.· Deployed in Alibaba Cloud clusters amid China's AI hardware push.· NeutraDC, Ishikari sign MoU for data center expansion.· Partnership targets AI and GPU-as-a-Service growth.· Supports April 2026 Japan data center launch.
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