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China’s Sugon unveils new AI infrastructure to rival platforms from Nvidia and Huawei

The Beijing-based supercomputer maker says its scaleX platform represents China’s first 10,000-card AI supercluster

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Supercomputer maker Sugon launches scaleX platform at an event in Kunshan, a city in eastern Jiangsu province. Photo: Handout
Eunice Xu
Chinese supercomputer maker Sugon has launched an advanced artificial intelligence infrastructure for data centres that is expected to rival similar high-performance platforms from Nvidia and Huawei Technologies.
Beijing-based Sugon, listed in Shanghai as Dawning Information Industry, on Thursday unveiled its scaleX platform at an event in Kunshan, a city in eastern Jiangsu province. The company claimed that it was China’s first 10,000-card AI supercluster, designed to deliver in excess of 5 eflops of total computing power.

An eflop, for exa floating-point operations per second, is a unit used to measure the performance of supercomputers and high-performance AI hardware that could calculate at least one quintillion floating-point operations per second.

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“The scaleX 10,000-card supercluster is a large-scale computing infrastructure designed for complex scenarios such as trillion-parameter models and AI for science,” said Sugon senior vice-president Li Bin, in a statement. This infrastructure leverages the company’s “expertise in the research and development of large-scale computer systems”.

Some of the scaleX supercluster’s capabilities have already surpassed those of Nvidia’s Rubin Ultra NVL576 rack, according to Li. The new Nvidia platform is expected to be introduced in 2027.

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Growing competition in the AI infrastructure arena underscores China’s high demand for greater computing power to process data and perform various digital tasks.

A worker sets up a display at the booth of Sugon ahead of the World artificial intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July 2023. Photo: AP
A worker sets up a display at the booth of Sugon ahead of the World artificial intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July 2023. Photo: AP
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