Alibaba, China Telecom Launch Shaoguan AI Data Center

Alibaba Group Holding and China Telecom launched a new data center in Shaoguan, Guangdong province, on Tuesday, equipped with 10,000 domestically developed Zhenwu AI chips to bolster China's artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The facility, the first large-scale deployment of Zhenwu technology in the Greater Bay Area, operates as a unified supercomputing platform capable of handling AI models with hundreds of billions of parameters. Designed for both training and inference tasks, the cluster achieves ultralow latency of four microseconds and delivers a 30 percent improvement in efficiency for these processes, according to Alibaba. Single-chip throughput has increased nearly tenfold, enabling applications in healthcare, advanced manufacturing, and materials science. Smaller enterprises can access the resources through China Telecom's platform on a per-card or hourly basis, promoting broader adoption.

Alibaba plans to expand the system to 100,000 chips, enhancing cost-effectiveness and computational power as demand for AI workloads grows. The project stems from the company's THead semiconductor unit, which integrates chip design, data center construction, AI model development,...