[News] Alibaba T-Head Unveils New AI Chip Said to Match NVIDIA H20 as IPO Speculation Builds

Amid speculation over a potential spinoff and IPO application, Alibaba’s chip unit T-Head has released its latest chip. According to Chinese outlet Phoenix New Media, Alibaba T-Head has listed its high-end AI chip, Zhenwu 810E, on its official website, with the report noting that the chip features a fully self-developed hardware and software stack and had previously drawn attention following earlier media disclosures.

As per T-Head’s official website, the Zhenwu PPU adopts a self-developed computing architecture and the company’s proprietary inter-chip interconnect technology, ICN (Inter-Chip Network). Paired with a fully in-house software stack, this enables a completely self-developed hardware-and-software system, as the report highlights.

The chip is equipped with 96 GB of HBM2e memory, and its inter-chip interconnect bandwidth reaches 700 GB/s. It is designed for applications including AI training, AI inference, and autonomous driving, the report adds.

The report notes that, based on key specifications, Zhenwu’s overall performance is said to surpass NVIDIA’s A800 and domestically produced Chinese GPUs, and is described as being comparable to NVIDIA’s H20. Some sources also suggest that an upgraded version of the Zhenwu PPU may deliver performance exceeding NVIDIA’s A100.

In addition, the Zhenwu PPU has already been deployed in multiple clusters comprising tens of thousands of chips on Alibaba Cloud, serving more than 400 customers, including State Grid, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, XPeng Motors, and Sina Weibo, as noted by STAR Market Daily.

Notably, Phoenix New Media notes that the chip’s launch marks the full emergence of Alibaba’s so-called “AI golden triangle,” comprising Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Cloud, and T-Head. Sources say Alibaba is positioning this as an AI supercomputing platform that enables coordinated innovation across chip architecture, cloud platform, and model architecture to maximize efficiency when training and deploying large models on Alibaba Cloud.

Questions Remain Over T-Head’s Standalone Profitability

Still, aside from the chip’s claimed performance gains, Jiemian News notes that from a business-model perspective, T-Head primarily delivers computing power through AI cloud services, with its revenue closely tied to Alibaba Cloud. This makes it difficult for external observers to clearly assess T-Head’s standalone profitability.

Looking ahead, as IPO planning moves forward, Jiemian News adds that T-Head will need to accelerate its expansion beyond the Alibaba ecosystem, broaden external sales channels, and establish clearer pricing mechanisms for transactions with its parent Alibaba. This, the report notes, would allow the market to better evaluate T-Head’s independent profit-generating capability.

Read more

• [News] Alibaba Chip Unit T-Head Reportedly Eyes Spinoff & IPO; AI Chip Said Comparable to NVIDIA H20
• [News] Alibaba T-Head PPU Lands China Unicom Deal, Reportedly Matches NVIDIA H20 Performance

(Photo credit: T-Head)