The source didn't name the chip supplier, but Z.ai's recent training history points to Huawei. The company released GLM-5.2 in June , an open-weight model purportedly trained entirely on Huawei Ascend accelerators with no Nvidia hardware involved, and it topped the open-weight leaderboards within a week. Z.ai, formerly known as Zhipu, has also been on the U.S. Commerce Department's entity list since January 2025, which cuts off legal access to Nvidia silicon and leaves domestic parts as its only supply line.
Raw power draw flatters the comparison with U.S. sites of similar size, however. Chinese accelerators such as Huawei's Ascend line trail Nvidia's current Blackwell parts on performance per watt, so a gigawatt of domestic silicon delivers less usable training compute than a gigawatt consumed by Nvidia systems.
Beijing is drafting a plan to spend roughly 2 trillion yuan ($295 billion) over five years on a nationwide grid of AI data centers , with at least 80% of the underlying technology sourced from Chinese suppliers. Filling those facilities is a big problem, though, as SMIC's most advanced stable node — the roughly 7nm-class N+2 process — is running above 93% utilization.
In addition, scarce domestic HBM constrains how many Ascend-class accelerators Huawei can assemble, and Huawei shipped around 812,000 AI chips last year. Ultimately, China can put up a 1GW shell much faster than the chips needed to draw 1GW can be produced.
Huawei-led team claims it post-trained DeepSeek's 1.6-trillion-parameter model — 1,000 Ascend 910C chips used in training
Chinese Z.ai's latest model tops AI ranking charts amid Anthropic Fable 5 ban
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/z-ai-powers-up-1gw-ai-data-center-built-entirely-on-chinese-chips#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/subscription
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.