Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has introduced its first chip called the Hanguang 800 to power AI processes. Revealed at its Aspara Conference recently held in Hangzhou, China, the AI inference chip has been developed by T-Head under the Alibaba DAMO Academy.

The chip is said to specialize in the acceleration of machine learning tasks, which means it can reduce computing tasks down to just five minutes, which would have otherwise taken as long as an hour.

Alibaba said the company is at present using the chip internally within its business operations, especially in product search and automatic translation on e-commerce sites, personalized recommendations, advertising, and intelligent customer services.

With the launch of Hanguang 800, Jeff Zhang, Alibaba Group CTO and President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence believes that the company will be able to boost computing capabilities to drive both its current and emerging businesses while improving energy-efficiency.