Alibaba runs 10,000 local AI chips

Alibaba and China Telecom have opened an artificial intelligence data center in Shaoguan with 10,000 Alibaba-designed Zhenwu chips. (cnbc.com) The companies announced the site on April 8 and said China Telecom will own and operate it in Guangdong province. Alibaba said the Zhenwu processors are built for both model training and inferencing. (cnbc.com) Alibaba and China Telecom said the cluster can run models with hundreds of billions of parameters, and they expect to expand it from 10,000 chips to 100,000 chips. They said the system can be used in fields including healthcare and advanced materials. (finance.yahoo.com) Artificial intelligence data centers are warehouses full of specialized processors linked together so companies can train models and serve answers to users. In this case, Alibaba is trying to do that with chips designed in China instead of relying on Nvidia hardware from the United States. (cnbc.com) That push follows several years of United States restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports to China, including high-end artificial intelligence chips. Chinese technology groups have responded by building domestic alternatives for computing, networking and cloud services. (cnbc.com) Alibaba has been designing processors through its T-Head chip unit while also selling cloud computing and its own artificial intelligence models. In its fiscal 2025 annual report, the company said public cloud revenue growth accelerated and revenue from artificial intelligence-related products posted triple-digit growth for seven straight quarters. (cnbc.com) (www1.hkexnews.hk) Alibaba announced the new cluster on the same day Chief Executive Eddie Wu created a technology committee to speed up the company’s artificial intelligence work. Wu said he will lead the group with Chief Artificial Intelligence Architect Zhou Jingren, Alibaba Cloud Chief Technology Officer Li Feifei and Alibaba Group Chief Technology Officer Wu Zeming. (cnbc.com) The Shaoguan launch also lands weeks after a separate Chinese computing cluster built with Huawei Ascend 910C chips went online. China’s largest internet and telecom companies are now racing to add capacity with domestic parts, even as United States companies still spend far more on artificial intelligence infrastructure overall. (cnbc.com) For Alibaba, the immediate test is whether a 10,000-chip domestic system can win paying cloud customers at scale. The company has now turned its chip program into a commercial data center, not just an in-house hardware project. (cnbc.com)