SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Cisco Systems launched on Wednesday a new networking chip designed to connect artificial intelligence data centers, with the cloud computing units of Microsoft and Alibaba enrolling as the chip's customers.

The P200 chip, as Cisco calls it, will compete against rival offerings from Broadcom. It will sit at the heart of a new routing device that the company also rolled out on Wednesday and is designed to connect the sprawling data centers that are located over vast distances and which train AI systems.