Samsung Electronics said Dec. 18 it will mass-produce an artificial intelligence chip for Chinese web portal operator Baidu early next year.

The South Korean tech firm will manufacture Kunlun, the Chinese internet firm’s first cloud-to-edge AI accelerator, which is to be built on Baidu’s XPU, the company‘s own neural processor architecture, along with Samsung’s 14-nanometer process technology and its I-Cube package solution, it added. 

This is the first foundry cooperation between the two sides.

With the latest deal, Samsung said it will expand its foundry business into high performance computing  chips that are used for cloud and edge computing.

“Baidu Kunlun is an important milestone for Samsung Foundry as we’re expanding our business area beyond mobile to data center applications by developing and mass-producing AI chips,” Ryan Lee, vice president for foundry marketing at Samsung, said in a release.

Baidu said the chip will allow the company to conduct various AI-related services effectively, such as search ranking and speech recognition.

By Ram Garikipati and newswires (ram@heraldcorp.com)