Z.ai Activates 1-Gigawatt AI Data Center Using Only Chinese Chips
Chinese AI developer Z.ai (formerly Zhipu) has completed construction of a 1-gigawatt data center equipped exclusively with domestically produced chips and partially activated it, according to a Bloomberg report. The facility will train the company's GLM model family. Z.ai now operates several computing clusters with over 10,000 chips each. While the chip supplier was not named, evidence points to Huawei's Ascend accelerators, as Z.ai's GLM-5.2 model was trained entirely on Huawei hardware. The company has been on the U.S. entity list since January 2025, cutting off access to Nvidia silicon. However, Chinese chips trail Nvidia on performance per watt, meaning a gigawatt of domestic silicon delivers less usable compute. The development comes as Beijing plans to spend roughly $295 billion over five years on a nationwide AI data center grid, with at least 80% domestic technology. Supply constraints persist due to SMIC's high utilization and scarce domestic HBM memory.
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