Alibaba teams up with China Telecom to launch a self-developed AI chip data center, deploying 10,000 “Zhenwu” processors

China e-commerce giant Alibaba and China Telecom announced on Tuesday that they have put a brand-new data center into operation in southern China, powered by AI chips Alibaba developed in-house. The move marks an important step forward for China’s domestic AI infrastructure buildout.

Tens of thousands of Zhenwu chips go live, supporting trillion-parameter models

The data center is located in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province. It is equipped with 10,000 Alibaba in-house developed “Zhenwu” semiconductor chips, designed specifically for AI training and inference, and capable of supporting large-scale models with thousands of billions of parameters. These models are among the largest AI models in the world today, underscoring the rapid progress of China’s top technology companies in the independent R&D of AI chips.

According to a report by CNBC, Alibaba and China Telecom said that in the future the data center is expected to expand to a scale of 100k chips. The computing cluster can be applied across multiple industry sectors, including healthcare and advanced materials.

US chip restrictions accelerate China’s homegrown development

Over the past several years, the United States has continued to restrict China from obtaining key semiconductor technologies, including NVIDIA’s AI chips. Ironically, this has accelerated China’s efforts to develop domestic alternatives. Alibaba, through its semiconductor unit “T-head,” independently designs chips. At the same time, as one of China’s largest cloud computing service providers, it handles everything end-to-end—from chip design and data center construction to AI model development—then sells the services externally through its cloud computing division. In recent quarters, cloud computing has become one of Alibaba’s fastest-growing businesses.

China’s AI infrastructure strategy: spend less, earn steadily

Notably, China’s technology companies take a very different investment approach to AI infrastructure than US big tech. While US technology giants are expected to invest about $700 billion this year to build AI infrastructure, Chinese companies choose to reduce spending and focus AI technologies on industry applications they believe can drive revenue growth and deliver investment returns.

In addition, China is also increasing its push to build large-scale data centers using domestic technologies. Last month, a computing cluster powered by Huawei’s advanced Ascend 910C AI chips officially went online, further demonstrating China’s determination and progress toward AI chip self-sufficiency.

This article Alibaba and China Telecom team up to deploy an in-house AI chip data center with 10,000 “Zhenwu” processors first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.