For a year, one question has hung over China’s fast-improving AI models: what are they actually running on? Z.AI has just given part of the answer. It has built a huge data centre that uses only Chinese-made chips.
The company, formerly known as Zhipu, has started partially operating the site, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. It is a 1-gigawatt hub built to train Z.AI’s GLM models. Z.AI did not respond to a request for comment.
What was built
The scale is the headline. A gigawatt is roughly the power draw of 750,000 homes at any one moment. That puts the site among the largest server hubs any Chinese AI lab has built.
The chip count is just as striking. Z.AI now runs several computing clusters, each holding more than 10,000 chips, the person said. Crucially, none of them are Nvidia’s.
Bloomberg did not name the exact chips. China’s leading designer of AI accelerators is Huawei, which competes with local firms such as Cambricon and Alibaba to close the gap on Nvidia.
Why it matters
US export controls have blocked China’s labs from buying Nvidia’s most powerful chips. The open question was whether homegrown parts could carry the load for training frontier models, not just running them.
A 1GW cluster built entirely on domestic silicon is a real answer to that question. It suggests Chinese labs can keep scaling even while cut off from the chips the rest of the industry treats as default.
The timing sharpens the point. The buildout lands days after Beijing-based Moonshot’s Kimi K3 matched top US models, then ran short of compute and paused new sign-ups. Z.AI is racing the same rivals, and it is betting on owning the hardware.
The bigger buildout
Z.AI is not doing this alone. China is preparing to spend around 2 trillion yuan, about $295bn, over five years on data centres across the country. Cloud giants Alibaba and China Telecom remain the biggest builders so far.
The company also has the money to compete. Fresh from a Hong Kong listing and a follow-on share sale, Z.AI is on track for $1bn in annual recurring revenue, which would make it the first Chinese AI firm to reach that mark. Its shares jumped almost 20% on the day.
It is positioning itself as an enterprise AI supplier, a role that invites comparison with Anthropic.
The catch
A few caveats are worth keeping. The chip details come from an anonymous source, and Z.AI has not confirmed them. Building the cluster is not the same as proving it can train a frontier model as efficiently as an Nvidia one.
Domestic chips can still lag on raw performance, and stitching thousands of them into a stable system is hard. The real test is the next GLM model, and how it compares with what the US labs ship.
Still, the direction is clear. The effort to build a Chinese alternative to Nvidia has moved from slideware to a working, gigawatt-scale data centre. That alone changes the debate about how far export controls can hold.
