Alibaba Wu Yongming: Pingtouge chips rank first among domestic options in training and inference diversity.

At Alibaba's latest earnings call, Group CEO Eddie Wu disclosed the progress of its chip subsidiary T-Head's self-developed efforts.

Currently, T-Head's self-developed "Zhenwu" chip has served over 650 customers cumulatively (as of early August); its flagship product, the Zhenwu M890 super-node instance, recently went live on Alibaba Cloud, entering the phase of scaled commercialization, with shipment volumes expected to ramp up steadily starting in the second half of the year.

Judging by this pace, Alibaba's AI commercialization is showing a clear layered evolution: upstream AI computing power and cloud business have entered a positive cycle of simultaneous revenue and profit growth, midstream self-developed chips are accelerating toward scaled commercial deployment, while downstream AI applications represented by "Qwen" remain in the investment phase.

Wu stated at the meeting that T-Head's chips rank among the top tier of domestic chips in terms of compatibility across multi-industry training and inference; and in future capacity and supply chain layout, they firmly hold a top-two position in the industry.

He emphasized that self-developed chips are Alibaba's long-term strategic direction. As T-Head's self-developed chip capacity continues to ramp up, the share of self-developed chips in Alibaba's data centers will further increase, gradually replacing more commercially procured external chips.

Against the backdrop of current supply falling short of demand for computing power, commercial chips already carry relatively high gross margins; a significant increase in the self-developed ratio will substantially enhance Alibaba Cloud's product competitiveness and overall gross margin performance.