Alibaba's shares jump after it lands a major customer for its AI chips (www.cnbc.com)

China Unicom will deploy AI accelerators developed by Alibaba’s semiconductor arm Pingtouge (T-Head) through Alibaba Cloud, state broadcaster CCTV reported — a tie-up that sent Alibaba shares up over 5% in Hong Kong and higher in U.S. premarket trading. The chips won’t be sold standalone; instead telecom customers will access their compute via Alibaba’s cloud services. The deployment is part of a large new Sanjiangyuan data center in Qinghai and will also include chips from other domestic vendors such as MetaX and Biren Technology. Reports are sourced to CCTV and independently corroborated to CNBC; Alibaba has not provided an immediate comment and it’s unclear whether China Unicom will use Pingtouge’s newest chip designs. The deal is significant because it accelerates adoption of a domestic AI hardware stack at scale, linking one of China’s biggest telcos with a leading cloud/AI provider. That matters amid growing U.S.–China tensions over advanced AI GPUs — the Financial Times recently reported Chinese regulators told firms to halt purchases of certain Nvidia chips — and supports Beijing’s push for self-reliance in semiconductors and AI infrastructure. Technically, the move emphasizes cloud-delivered access to AI accelerators (rather than direct chip sales), strengthens Alibaba Cloud’s position in telecom-edge and hyperscale deployments, and could help domestically designed accelerators gain production footprints and software integration at major data centers.