China is stepping up efforts to build a self-reliant AI ecosystem, with a new large-scale data centre taking shape in Shaoguan, Guangdong. Jointly advanced by Alibaba and China Telecom, the facility will be owned and operated by the telecom giant, positioning it as a key infrastructure hub just north of the Greater Bay Area.

At launch, the centre will deploy 10,000 of Alibaba’s in-house Zhenwu AI chips, designed to handle both training and inference for large-scale models with hundreds of billions of parameters. The computing power will support applications across sectors such as healthcare and advanced materials.

The project reflects a broader national push to strengthen domestic semiconductor and AI capabilities, as companies accelerate innovation amid external technology restrictions. Alibaba, already a major cloud computing provider, continues to integrate its proprietary chips and AI models into its expanding digital ecosystem.

The Shaoguan hub also aligns with wider efforts to scale up data infrastructure using homegrown technologies.