Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent invested in Zhipu, a competitor to OpenAI
China’s largest tech companies, including Alibaba and Tencent, have funded Zhipu, a startup that is seen in China as a response to the American OpenAI.
What is known
This year, Zhipu has raised 2.5 billion yuan (about $341 million), the company said in a statement. Investors include venture capital funds Sequoia and Hillhouse, as well as tech giants Xiaomi, Alibaba, and Tencent.
Zhipu develops artificial intelligence models based on big data for various applications. In August, the company released a chatbot based on its own AI models.
The investment announcement came amid the technological confrontation between the US and China, where AI plays a key role. Beijing considers artificial intelligence to be the most important technology and plans to increase computing power for its development by 50% by 2025.
However, the US has restricted the supply of NVIDIA chips to China, which are critical for training AI models. In particular, the ban applies to the top accelerators A100 and H100.
Apart from Zhipu, there are other AI startups in China backed by local tech giants. For example, this week Baichuan raised $300 million from Alibaba and Tencent.
