Z.AI's Use of Chinese Chips for New Model is About Optimization

Using domestic chips shows that Chinese vendors are becoming more self-reliant and improving inference performance on AI chips.

August 27, 2026

Chinese AI vendor Z.ai said it used 100,000 China-made chips to handle online queries to its latest AI model, GLM-5.3 Flash.

The move shows how Chinese vendors are reducing their dependence on U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, while also highlighting the trend toward greater optimization of AI models.

The new open-weight, multimodal model is low-cost, with 320 billion parameters. Z.ai originally previewed the model under the code name Ox Alpha on August 20 and officially released it under the MIT open source license on August 26. The model is specialized for long-context processing, vision-driven agentic tasks and code synthesis.