INTC Intel Corporation

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., largely left behind in the cloud-computing boom, has received a helping hand from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

The Chinese e-commerce company on Friday said it would use AMD graphics chips as part of its cloud infrastructure services, which run computing operations for other companies. The companies also said they plan joint research efforts.

No financial details were disclosed. But any endorsement in the data center is good news for AMD, whose rivals have reaped the benefits as cloud companies spend heavily on servers and other hardware.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD competes with Intel Corp. in selling microprocessors using the x86 design that is standard in most personal computers and servers. In the past decade its chips briefly accounted for about a third of x86 server chip sales, but its share of that business dwindled to less than 1% as Intel developed more attractive technology.

AMD also sells chips called graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are best known for generating images in videogames played on PCs and gaming consoles. But rival Nvidia Corp. has been much more successful in pushing GPUs for other purposes, particularly for scientific calculations and an emerging class of computing chores at companies such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

AMD's shares, which have more than doubled this year, jumped 6% Friday following news of the Alibaba deal.

Alibaba also uses Nvidia GPUs and announced a collaboration with Nvidia in January that included new Nvidia-powered services and a joint research lab.

Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, said adding AMD technology to the technologies it uses will bring customers more "diversified" cloud-based graphics processing solutions.

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 14, 2016 14:05 ET (18:05 GMT)

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