Under US chip export controls, BAT's AI spending doubled to 50 billion yuan in the first half of the year!

On August 27th, according to foreign media reports, Chinese tech giant BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) has not slowed down its investment in the AI field.

In the first half of this year, BAT's total capital expenditure on artificial intelligence infrastructure reached 50 billion yuan, more than double that of the same period last year.

The focus of capital expenditures for the three companies is to purchase processors and infrastructure that support the training of large-scale artificial intelligence language models.

Alibaba CEO Wu Jihan has made it clear to investors that the company will continue to invest in research and development and artificial intelligence capital expenditures to ensure the growth of its AI driven cloud business.

Alibaba's capital expenditure in the first half of the year reached 23 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 123%, mainly used to purchase processors to train its unified series of AI models and lease computing power to other enterprises.

In addition, Tencent's capital expenditure also increased to 23 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 176%, partly due to increased investment in GPU and CPU servers.

Although Baidu has relatively restrained its capital expenditures, it still reached 4.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4%.

Despite US export controls restricting the sale of high-end AI processors to China, such as Nvidia's H100 and Blackwell series, Chinese tech giants can still purchase processors with lower performance, such as Nvidia's H20.

As one of Nvidia's main customers, ByteDance has also increased its spending in the field of artificial intelligence. It is estimated that it has purchased hundreds of thousands of H20 processors for China's data centers.