India, April 9 -- Alibaba, in partnership with China Telecom, has launched a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centre in southern China, powered entirely by its self-developed Zhenwu semiconductors. While the announcement may appear as another infrastructure expansion, it reflects a deeper structural shift in how large economies are rethinking control over AI compute stacks.

The facility is designed for both AI training and inferencing, with an initial deployment of 10,000 chips. It is capable of supporting models with hundreds of billions of parameters, placing it in the category of hyperscale AI infrastructure. China Telecom will own and operate the facility, indicating a clear separation between technology development and infrastr...