Market sources indicate that Alibaba Group has decided to support the future independent listing of its chip company, T-Head Semiconductors.
T-Head Semiconductors is a wholly-owned chip company under Alibaba Group. Since its establishment in 2018, it has maintained a very low profile within the industry, acting as a "strategic weapon" held in reserve by Alibaba for many years. Now, T-Head's chips are officially coming to light.
Alibaba has declined to comment on this news.
In September 2025, a brief segment in a CCTV News Broadcast report on T-Head's self-developed chips attracted significant attention, offering the outside world a glimpse of T-Head's capabilities. The report showed that this GPU chip, named the PPU, features 96GB of HBM2e memory, an inter-chip interconnect bandwidth of 700GB/s, a PCIe 5.0×16 interface, and a power consumption of only 400W. On these key parameters, it has completely surpassed NVIDIA's A800 and mainstream domestic GPUs, with overall performance comparable to NVIDIA's H20.
According to foreign media reports, the performance of T-Head's first-generation PPU is competitive with NVIDIA's popular H20, while an upgraded version of the PPU is even more powerful than NVIDIA's A100. Due to its excellent and stable performance and outstanding cost-effectiveness, T-Head's PPU chip has a strong reputation within the industry, with market demand outstripping supply.
To date, T-Head has launched the HanGuang 800 AI inference chip, the Yitian 710 CPU, and the PPU AI chip in the computing power sector. In the storage chip sector, it has launched the Zhenyue 510 SSD controller chip, and it is reportedly set to launch related chips in the networking chip sector, having already established a full-stack data center chip portfolio. T-Head has also released the Yuzhen IoT chip for edge devices, which has already achieved shipments in the hundreds of millions, covering both cloud and terminal deployments.
Industry analysts believe that Alibaba and Google will lead AI development in China and the US, respectively, as both possess full-stack layouts ranging from AI chips and cloud computing to large models and AI applications. In Google's AI strategy, its self-developed TPU chip is a critical component. As the listing process begins, the capabilities T-Head has accumulated over the years in foundational chips are finally becoming apparent, revealing the final piece of Alibaba's full-stack AI puzzle.
