For a year, one question has hung over China’s fast-improving AI models: what are they actually running on? Z.AI has just given part of the answer. It has built a huge data centre that uses only Chinese-made chips.
The company, formerly known as Zhipu, has started partially operating the site, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. It is a 1-gigawatt hub built to train Z.AI’s GLM models. Z.AI did not respond to a request for comment.
What was built
The scale is the headline. A gigawatt is roughly the power draw of 750,000 homes at any one moment. That puts the site among the largest server hubs any Chinese AI lab has built.
The chip count is just as striking. Z.AI now runs several computing clusters, each holding more than 10,000 chips, the person said. Crucially, none of them are Nvidia’s.
