Alibaba targets Nvidia’s dominant software ecosystem with open-source AI stack

Alibaba Group Holding’s chip design unit, T-Head, has announced that it will open-source its proprietary software stack, marking its latest effort to streamline developer operations and challenge the dominance of American chip giant Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem.At the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai on Saturday, T-Head announced that it was making the full technical stack of SAIL – the foundational software architecture for the unit’s Zhenwu series of AI chips – freely available to international developers starting on the same day.The move is part of a broader campaign by Chinese AI chipmakers, including Huawei Technologies and Moore Threads Technology, to promote open, collaborative software ecosystems as an alternative to Nvidia’s dominant CUDA toolkit – the industry standard for writing software for graphics processing units.