Alibaba wins China Unicom Deal for pingtouge AI accelerators

Alibaba Group Holdings has won China Unicom as a client for its AI chips. Per CCTV report late Tuesday, China’s second-biggest wireless carrier will use Alibaba’s Pingtouge, or T-Head AI accelerators.

The carrier will place the chips in its expansive new data center in northwestern China, together with accelerators from MetaX and Biren Technology, which are already in use. Alibaba’s recent interest in T-Head and chip development aligns with Jack Ma’s stepped-up participation in the company’s strategy this year. 

Alibaba has been advancing its development in AI infrastructure

Alibaba has recently invested more in AI infrastructure to compete with Chinese tech companies like Huawei and reduce its dependence on Nvidia Corporation’s designs. So far, it has committed 380 billion yuan ($53.5 billion) to the initiative over three years. Alibaba Cloud has also begun delivering large volumes of AI chips to Unicom’s data facilities, though more details have not been disclosed.

Nonetheless, more information about its AI chip efforts surfaced earlier this week during CCTV’s coverage of Premier Li Qiang’s visit to Qinghai. The report briefly showed a billboard at Unicom’s Sanjiangyuan data center outlining the telecom’s deployment of Alibaba chips. In a separate briefing, Unicom added that Alibaba’s AI chip outperforms Huawei’s Ascend 910B in several key hardware metrics, including more advanced memory. 

However, Huawei is introducing the more powerful Ascend 910C for its part. Nevertheless, last month, the Wall Street Journal also revealed that Alibaba has designed an AI chip that can operate AI services, including DeepSeek’s R1 and its Qwen series.

As recently reported by Cryptopolitan, DeepSeek has delayed the launch of its latest AI model after encountering persistent technical challenges with Huawei’s Ascend processors.

The Chinese artificial intelligence company had been encouraged by authorities to use Huawei’s chips instead of US-made Nvidia products after the successful release of its R1 model in January. Still, the firm ran into major issues during the training phase of its R2 model. These issues forced DeepSeek to rely on Nvidia chips for training, while using Huawei’s Ascend chips for inference.

Meanwhile, Alibaba’s push into chipmaking parallels similar initiatives by other Chinese tech giants working on homegrown AI silicon amid restrictions on Nvidia’s most advanced products. Nvidia’s AI accelerators are considered the industry standard for training next-generation models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Baidu said in August that it had landed a 10 billion yuan deal to deliver servers using its Kunlun chips to China Mobile, Unicom’s bigger rival.

Nvidia’s new AI chip has only pulled in little interest from the Chinese market

Nvidia recently unveiled its new RTX6000D chip for Chinese consumers, but early feedback points to sluggish demand. According to Reuters, sources claim that Chinese tech players are only mildly interested in the product.

Trump-era restrictions have led to ongoing changes in AI hardware, limiting the number of Nvidia AI chips that can be sold in China. The H20, its lower-tier China-specific AI chip, was prohibited from export in April. Nvidia’s RTX5090D GPU shipments, once widely used for AI research, were also frozen. The company has since introduced the B30A AI chip and the RTX6000D GPU tailored for the Chinese market. It received permission to export in July, provided that 15% of H20 revenue is paid to Washington.

Reuters highlighted industry complaints that the $7,000 RTX6000D (approximately 9.66 million won) under-delivers compared with the RTX5090D, which remains available through black-market channels. The outlet further reported that “companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance are awaiting confirmation on H20 order processing.”

Chinese authorities have also been encouraging the use of homegrown AI semiconductors. According to reports, they summoned major firms like Tencent and ByteDance to question their procurement of the H20 and warned of possible information security issues.

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