China Develops Huge AI Data Center Powered by Domestic Chips

China’s China Unicom has built a major AI data center in Xining, the capital of the western province of Qinghai, with a total investment of approximately $390 million. According to the Qinghai provincial government website, once completed, the center will achieve 20,000 petaflops of computing power. Currently, it has reached 3,579 petaflops, using nearly 23,000 domestic AI chips.

Note: A petaflop measures a computer’s processing capacity, indicating how many mathematical calculations a supercomputer can perform per second.

CCTV reported that about 72% of the chips were supplied by Alibaba’s chip unit, T-Head, while the remaining came from Meta-X, Biren Tech, and Zhonghao Xinying. Future purchases are planned from TechOrigin, Moore Threads, and Enflame.

Alibaba’s T-Head has developed a powerful AI chip called a PPU, which features 96 GB of memory and uses HBM2E technology. HBM2E is a vertically stacked DRAM chip specifically designed for AI applications.

CCTV compared Alibaba’s PPU chip to Nvidia’s latest H20 model, currently approved for sale in China, suggesting that domestically produced chips are technologically on par with U.S. competitors.

Meanwhile, Beijing announced last Monday that a preliminary investigation found evidence of antitrust violations against Nvidia.

China Unicom, Alibaba, Biren, Meta-X, Enflame, TechOrigin, and Zhonghao Xinying have not commented on the matter.

Amid the ongoing China-U.S. tech tensions, the Chinese government is emphasizing the use of domestic chips and advising caution in relying on American Nvidia chips for security reasons.