Z.ai, the Beijing frontier lab formerly known as Zhipu, has completed a roughly 1-gigawatt data center powered entirely by domestically made AI chips, with parts already running training for its GLM model series, per Pandaily and Bloomberg. The company also acquired Zhongke Jiahe, a heterogeneous computing software firm spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' computing institute, whose compiler technology helps run the same model across a fragmented mix of Huawei, Cambricon and other domestic accelerators. Z.ai is in early talks with domestic chip designers about custom silicon of its own, per The Information. The buildout follows Z.ai's January 2025 placement on the U.S. Commerce Department's Entity List, which cut off Nvidia hardware. Its stack of data center, compiler and prospective chip design shows Chinese frontier labs building around U.S. export controls rather than waiting for them to loosen.
Read at Pandaily ↗ • Read at Bloomberg ↗ • Read at The Information ↗
Moore Threads, a Chinese GPU designer, unveiled the MTT C256 supernode at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, TechNode reported. The system packs 256 of its own GPUs into two racks and links them on a single network layer with under a microsecond of latency. The company demonstrated training of a 236 billion parameter mixture of experts model on more than 25 trillion tokens on the system. Multiple other Chinese GPU vendors, including Huawei, Biren and Muxi, showcased similar supernode products at WAIC, in an industry shift Chinese analysts have dubbed 2026's first year of domestic supernode production, per Pandaily. The demo lands as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology anchors an emerging domestic standard through its CLink interconnection protocol, which several of the WAIC supernodes supported. The push is pulling Chinese GPU vendors toward a common playbook of networking many midtier chips together rather than competing chip-for-chip.
Read at TechNode ↗ • Read at PanDaily ↗
Chinese police scientists have published research describing how they used AI tools to infiltrate dark web sites and decode underground content, a rare official look at a domestic surveillance capability, the South China Morning Post reported. Traditional web crawlers had struggled with the dark web's shifting login requirements, Captcha checks and anti-scraping tactics, so the researchers built AI tools to collect data and classify sensitive material once inside. The dark web relies on encrypted communications and anonymous routing that render user activity nearly untraceable, making it a common venue for illegal trafficking and data sales. The disclosure adds another AI capability to the surveillance stack Chinese police have publicly credited for monitoring encrypted platforms including Telegram and VPN traffic, per prior SCMP. It marks a rare instance of Beijing's security services documenting AI tooling in the open rather than deploying it quietly.
Read at South China Morning Post ↗