Alibaba's 10k‑Chip AI Centre

Alibaba and China Telecom have opened an artificial intelligence data center in Shaoguan, China, built around 10,000 of Alibaba’s own Zhenwu chips. (cnbc.com) The companies announced the facility on April 8, 2026. Alibaba said the Zhenwu processors are designed for both training models and running them after deployment, and China Telecom will own and operate the site in Guangdong province. (cnbc.com) A data center is a warehouse of computing power, and artificial intelligence systems need thousands of chips working together to train on huge datasets. Alibaba said this cluster can support models with hundreds of billions of parameters, the numeric settings that a model adjusts as it learns. (cnbc.com) Alibaba builds the chips through its T-Head semiconductor unit, while its cloud division sells computing services and artificial intelligence tools to customers. The company said in February 2025 that it would invest at least 380 billion yuan, about $53 billion, in cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure over three years. (cnbc.com) (alibabagroup.com) The project lands after the United States tightened export controls on advanced chips to China in October 2022 and expanded those rules again in October 2023. Those restrictions pushed Chinese companies to build domestic alternatives to Nvidia and other foreign suppliers. (bis.gov) (federalregister.gov) China’s biggest technology companies are now trying to assemble the whole stack at home: chips, networking, data centers, models, and cloud services. CNBC reported that a Huawei cluster using Ascend 910C chips went online last month, showing that Alibaba is not the only company scaling domestic compute. (cnbc.com) Alibaba has tied that push to commercial demand as well as policy pressure. In its fiscal 2025 annual report, the company said artificial-intelligence-related product revenue posted triple-digit growth for seven straight quarters and helped lift public cloud growth. (hkexnews.hk) The Shaoguan site is also meant to grow. Alibaba and China Telecom said the cluster is expected to expand from 10,000 chips to 100,000, a scale aimed at serving industries including healthcare and advanced materials. (cnbc.com) (qz.com) The immediate test is whether Alibaba’s chips can keep delivering at that larger scale, where speed depends not just on the processors but on the network and software that connect them. For now, the Shaoguan launch puts Alibaba’s in-house silicon into live production, not just lab development. (cnbc.com) (qz.com)