AI & Technology — 2026-04-09

Alibaba Deploys 10,000 Homegrown AI Chips in Data Center, Escalating US-China Tech Race

Alibaba and China Telecom launched a data center in Guangdong province housing 10,000 of Alibaba's homegrown Zhenwu AI chips, designed for training and inferencing models with hundreds of billions of parameters. The facility, owned and operated by China Telecom, is planned to scale to 100,000 chips. Alibaba now controls the full AI pipeline: chip design, data center infrastructure, large models, and cloud distribution. This reduces its dependence on US-restricted Nvidia hardware. The deployment signals China's accelerating effort to build a self-sufficient AI semiconductor stack.

Analysis
The Zhenwu deployment demonstrates China's ability to field domestically designed AI chips at data-center scale, a capability US export controls were intended to prevent. Alibaba's vertical integration (chip design through cloud distribution) mirrors the full-stack approach that gave Nvidia its dominance, but without dependence on US-controlled semiconductor equipment.

2 sources

Alibaba launches data center with 10,000 of its own chips as China ramps up AI push - CNBC
As AI race with US intensifies, China's Alibaba launches 10,000-card computing cluster - South China Morning Post