Z.ai Activates 1-Gigawatt AI Data Center Using Only Chinese-Made Chips
Chinese AI developer Z.ai (formerly Zhipu) has completed construction of a 1-gigawatt data center powered exclusively by domestically produced chips, with partial operations already underway, according to a Bloomberg report. The facility will train Z.ai's GLM model family and joins several other clusters operated by the company, each containing over 10,000 chips. While the chip supplier was not named, Z.ai's recent GLM-5.2 model was trained entirely on Huawei Ascend accelerators. The company has been on the U.S. Commerce Department's entity list since January 2025, blocking legal access to Nvidia hardware. However, Chinese chips like Huawei's Ascend trail Nvidia's Blackwell 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, with SMIC's 7nm-class node at over 93% utilization and Huawei shipping only 812,000 AI chips last year.
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