In a statement on Tuesday, the company claimed the Yitian 710, built by its own chip development business, T-Head, would enhance its cloud services along with its new proprietary servers, Panjiu.

Alibaba Cloud is the biggest cloud provider in China and offers elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualisation services, large-scale computing, security, management and application services, big data analytics, a machine learning platform and IoT services.

“Customising our own server chips is consistent with our ongoing efforts toward boosting our computing capabilities with better performance and improved energy efficiency,” said Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and Head of Alibaba DAMO Academy during the Apsara Conference, Alibaba’s annual technology flagship event.

“We plan to use the chips to support current and future businesses across the Alibaba Group ecosystem. We will also offer our clients next-generation computing services powered by the new chip-powered servers in the near future.

“Together with our global partners including Intel, NVIDIA, AMD and Arm, we will continue to innovate our compute infrastructure and offer diverse computing services for our global customers.”

Jeff Zhang speaking at the Apsara Conference on Tuesday. Courtesy Alibaba Cloud

The Yitian 710 is built on advanced 5nm technology and has 128 Arm cores with a top clock speed of 3.2GHz.

"Each processor chip has 60 billion integrated transistors" the company said. "Yitian 710 is the first server processor that is compatible with the latest Armv9 architecture and includes 8 DDR5 channels and 96-lane PCIe 5.0, providing high memory and I/O bandwidth.

"Yitian 710 achieved a score of 440 in SPECint2017 (a standard benchmark to measure CPU integer processing power), surpassing that of the current state-of-the-art Arm server processor by 20% in performance and 50% in energy efficiency."

Zhang also announced that Alibaba would open the source code of its XuanTie IP core series. The XuanTie series are custom-built processors based on RISC-V instruction-set architecture.

The source code will be made available on Github and the Open Chip Community. The source code of XuanTie-related software stacks, which support multiple operating systems, including Linux, Android, RTOS and Alibaba’s own AliOS, will also be released.

“By opening up the IP cores of our in-house IoT processors as well as related software stacks and development tools, we aim to assist global developers to build their own RISC-V-based chips in a much more cost-effective way,” Zhang said.

“We hope this move can encourage more innovation among the thriving RISC-V software community, and as a result help people enjoy the benefits of a connected world in the digital era.”

Calista Redmond, chief executive of RISC-V International, said: "Alibaba supports the RISC-V community through their continuous contributions, technical leadership, and deep collaboration with RISC-V stakeholders.

“Alibaba leads by example and has inspired the global RISC-V community to increase innovation in chip development with benefits to the entire RISC-V ecosystem."