Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has developed a home-grown semiconductor aimed at artificial-intelligence inference workloads, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The chip is said to process more AI tasks than existing in-house designs and remains compatible with software tools widely used for Nvidia Corp. hardware. The development is intended to help bridge what Chinese officials and companies describe as a growing ‘Nvidia gap’ as U.S. export restrictions limit access to high-end foreign processors. By focusing on inference—the stage where trained AI models are deployed in real-world applications—Alibaba can address immediate commercial needs in e-commerce, cloud services and logistics without the extreme performance requirements of model training. The move underscores Beijing’s broader push to cultivate domestic semiconductor capabilities and reduce reliance on overseas suppliers in strategically important technologies such as generative AI. No pricing or production timelines were disclosed.