China Central Television (CCTV)’s Xinwen Lianbo (News Network) featured the "China Unicom Sanjiangyuan Green Power Intelligent Computing Center Project" on the evening of September 16, accidentally revealing Alibaba’s chip subsidiary T-Head’s latest AI chip—PPU. Its key specs are striking, closely rivaling NVIDIA H20 and sparking immediate industry buzz.
The report detailed the signing and cooperation progress of multiple domestic AI chip brands, including T-Head and Muxi Semiconductor. Under the signed projects, Alibaba Cloud will deploy 1,024 devices with 16,384 T-Head computing cards, totaling 1,945P computing power—a remarkable scale.
The spotlight, T-Head’s PPU chip, boasts outstanding specs:
- VRAM: Equipped with 96GB HBM2e, matching NVIDIA H20 and exceeding NVIDIA A800’s 80GB HBM2e (though H20’s HBM3 is a generation ahead in technology).
- Inter-chip bandwidth: Reaches 700GB/s, far surpassing A800’s 400GB/s and slightly lower than H20.
- Interface: PCIe 5.0×16, consistent with H20 and superior to A800’s PCIe 4.0×16.
- Power consumption: 400W (same as A800), significantly lower than H20’s 550W.
PPU also outperforms most other domestic AI chips in these key indicators. However, CCTV’s coverage did not disclose PPU’s specific computing performance; industry insiders speculate it may be slightly lower than H20. If Alibaba’s earlier use of self-developed PPU for lightweight AI model training is true, it fully proves PPU’s solid overall performance—with the capability to partially replace NVIDIA H20.
As early as late August 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that Alibaba was secretly developing the new AI chip PPU, aiming to fill the gap left by NVIDIA in the Chinese market. The chip was already in testing, focusing on broader AI inference tasks and compatible with NVIDIA’s architecture. Recent reports further note that since the start of 2025, Alibaba has used self-developed PPU in lightweight AI model training, gradually replacing some NVIDIA GPUs.
With continuous breakthroughs in domestic chip technology, T-Head’s PPU chip injects a "booster" into China’s AI computing power market. It not only demonstrates Alibaba’s profound R&D expertise in chips but also is expected to accelerate the import substitution of domestic AI chips and reshape the industry’s competitive landscape.
ICgoodFind’s Take: Alibaba’s PPU chip, with its impressive specs, is set to boost the competitiveness of domestic AI computing power and drive industry development.
