On the evening of November 10, Alibaba issued an announcement officially initiating the process to spin off its wholly-owned subsidiary, T-Head (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd., for an independent listing on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
The announcement stated that the HKEX has confirmed Alibaba can proceed with this spin-off, and T-Head submitted a confidential A1 listing application form on September 11, 2026. Upon completion of the spin-off, T-Head is expected to remain a subsidiary of Alibaba but will have independent listing status and financing channels.
In the announcement, Alibaba defined T-Head as "a leading full-stack data center chip supplier in China," stating that "these chips enable system-level computing power solutions." This indicates that it neither positions itself as an "AI chip company" nor a "CPU company," but rather focuses on "full-stack" capabilities and "data centers."
From Hanguang 800 to Zhenwu Series
T-Head was established in 2018 through the integration of C-Sky Microsystems and the DAMO Academy chip team. At the 2019 Yunqi Conference, just one year after its founding, T-Head released its first self-developed AI inference chip, Hanguang 800. In ResNet-50 tests, its inference performance reached 78,563 IPS with an energy efficiency ratio of 500 IPS/W; Alibaba claimed its performance was equivalent to 10 GPUs. Hanguang 800 was initially deployed in Taobao's "Double 11" main search scenarios and subsequently provided computing power externally via Alibaba Cloud.
In 2021, T-Head launched Yitian 710, its first Arm server CPU. It utilizes a 5nm process and ARMv9 architecture, integrating 128 cores per chip, optimized for high-concurrency cloud computing scenarios. Yitian 710 is primarily used internally by Alibaba Cloud as part of its "One Cloud, Multiple Chips" strategy.
At the 2023 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba's T-Head unveiled its first SSD controller chip, Zhenyue 510. Deeply customized for cloud computing scenarios, this chip achieves ultra-low latency of4μs, reducing it by more than30% compared to mainstream industry standards, with a bit error rate as low as 10^-18, leading industry benchmarks by an order of magnitude. Zhenyue 510 will be deployed first in Alibaba Cloud data centers and can be applied to business scenarios such as AI, online analytics, online transactions, big data analysis, and high-performance databases.
However, it is the Zhenwu series of AI chips that truly positioned T-Head as a "full-stack data center chip supplier."
On January 29, 2026, T-Head officially published product information for its first data center AI chip, Zhenwu 810E, on its website. This chip had previously appeared in reports under the codename "PPU." In May 2026, T-Head released Zhenwu M890, which offers three times the performance of the previous generation Zhenwu 810E. Designed specifically for AI agent workloads, it features targeted optimizations for memory and communication bandwidth requirements.
Alibaba simultaneously announced a multi-year roadmap: launching V900 in Q3 2027 and J900 in Q3 2028. On September 22, 2026, Zhenwu V900 was showcased at the Yunqi Conference. Its performance is three times that of Zhenwu M890, representing a 200% improvement. Alibaba described it as "the most powerful Chinese self-developed AI chip currently available," capable of meeting the training and inference demands of trillion-parameter large models. Mass production and sales are scheduled for Q1 2027.
Commercialization Data: 560,000 Units and 650 Customers
Beyond the announcement, available operational data demonstrate T-Head's rapid commercialization progress in the data center sector over the past two years.
During Alibaba's FY2026 Q3 earnings call in March 2026, Alibaba stated that T-Head's self-developed GPU chip (Zhenwu 810E) had achieved scaled mass production. As of February 2026, cumulative deliveries had reached 470,000 units.
By April 2026, cumulative shipments of the Zhenwu series AI chips reached 560,000 units. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu mentioned T-Head's operating scale for the first time during the FY2026 Q3 earnings call, stating it had "successfully commercialized" with annualized revenue "exceeding the tens-of-billions level" (CNY).
In terms of customer coverage, the Zhenwu series serves over 650 enterprise customers across 20 industries, including finance, intelligent driving, large models, embodied intelligence, internet, energy, and manufacturing. External commercial customers account for more than 60%. AI supernodes based on Zhenwu M890 have supported efficient inference for large models exceeding 2 trillion parameters and have been scaled up on Alibaba Cloud.
IDC data provides a comparative benchmark. Domestic Chinese GPU and AI chip vendors delivered 1.65 million AI accelerator cards to the local AI server market in 2025, accounting for over 41% of total shipments of 4 million accelerator cards. Among them, T-Head's self-developed Zhenwu 810E shipped approximately 256,000 AI chips in 2025, ranking third in the domestic market behind Huawei and second among local enterprises.
Pricing the "Full-Stack" Separately The core reason Alibaba gave for the spin-off in the announcement is valuation clarity: allowing investors to better assess the value of Alibaba's retained group businesses while enabling T-Head's performance and potential to be evaluated independently and explicitly. A deeper consideration is that T-Head's business attributes differ significantly from Alibaba's core e-commerce and cloud services. Investors in the semiconductor and AI computing sectors have their own independent valuation frameworks. After the spin-off, T-Head can directly access equity and debt capital markets as an independent entity.
The announcement also disclosed a technical detail: Alibaba applied for and received a waiver from strict compliance with Paragraph 3(f) of Practice Note 15 of the Listing Rules regarding the provision of assured entitlements to existing shareholders. Reasons cited included the cumbersome requirements of US securities laws for T-Head's public offering, PRC legal restrictions on pre-IPO shares in global offerings, and the fact that this spin-off is not material to Alibaba's total assets, revenue, or net profit.
T-Head's H-share listing still requires approval from the HKEX Listing Committee and completion of filing with the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). The size of the global offering and the extent of the reduction in Alibaba's shareholding percentage have not yet been determined. Reuters' IFR previously reported that T-Head plans to IPO in Hong Kong in 2027, aiming to raise approximately USD 2 billion to 3 billion.
Editor: ChipInsight - Langkejian