Alibaba opens a domestic‑chip AI data centre

Alibaba did not just add more servers this week. It opened an artificial intelligence data center in Shaoguan, Guangdong, with China Telecom that runs on 10,000 chips designed by Alibaba itself instead of imported market leaders. (cnbc.com) The site is built for two jobs: training, which is the long process of teaching a model from huge piles of data, and inferencing, which is the fast step where a trained model answers a question or writes a reply. Alibaba and China Telecom said this cluster can handle models with hundreds of billions of parameters, the internal settings that shape how a model behaves. (cnbc.com) (scmp.com) A data center is basically a warehouse full of computers, but for artificial intelligence the expensive part is no longer the building. The scarce part is the chip, because one advanced model can require thousands of accelerators working together at the same time. (cnbc.com) That is why the choice of chip matters as much as the choice of customer. The new Shaoguan facility uses Alibaba’s Zhenwu processors, making this the first large-scale deployment of that chip in a commercial data center. (finance.yahoo.com) (cnbc.com) Alibaba has been trying to build its own silicon for years. In September 2019, it introduced Hanguang 800, its first artificial intelligence inference chip, through its T-Head semiconductor unit and said it was aimed at search, recommendations, and customer service workloads. (alibabacloud.com) (alibabagroup.com) The company now has a stronger reason to keep going than it did in 2019. Alibaba’s fiscal year 2025 annual report said revenue from artificial-intelligence-related products grew at a triple-digit rate for seven straight quarters, which means its cloud business needs far more computing capacity than it did a year earlier. (hkexnews.hk) China’s internet companies are also building under tighter outside constraints. The United States has spent the past few years tightening export controls on advanced artificial intelligence chips to China, which has pushed Chinese firms to use more domestic designs and more domestic manufacturing wherever they can. (cnbc.com) (scmp.com) That helps explain why Alibaba paired with China Telecom instead of building this as a solo showpiece. China Telecom brings state-backed network infrastructure and enterprise customers, while Alibaba brings the cloud software, the models, and now the chips. (cnbc.com) (finance.yahoo.com) The location is part of the story too. Shaoguan has become one of China’s major data-center hubs under the national “east data, west computing” style push to move heavy computing into places with more land and power capacity than the biggest coastal cities. (cnbc.com) Alibaba and China Telecom said the site is expected to expand from 10,000 chips to 100,000 chips. If that happens, this stops looking like a one-off demonstration and starts looking like a template for how China wants to build artificial intelligence infrastructure: domestic cloud, domestic telecom pipes, and domestic chips in the same stack. (cnbc.com)