The final piece of the puzzle for Alibaba's AI full stack layout may emerge soon.

On January 22nd, according to media reports such as The Paper, Alibaba Group is planning to restructure its chip design business unit T-Head and support its future independent listing. As soon as the news came out, Alibaba's US stock price surged sharply in pre-market trading, with an increase of over 5% at one point. However, Alibaba has not yet made a formal response to this news.

The split of Pingtou Ge is seen as an important signal for Alibaba's AI strategy to accelerate the formation of its self-developed system. Some analysts believe that if Pingtou Ge successfully splits and goes public, it will enhance Alibaba's competitiveness and influence in the chip field, bring new development opportunities for Alibaba's layout in the semiconductor field, but it will also become a new variable in the Sino US chip game.

Nuclear weapons have surfaced

Pingtou Ge is a wholly-owned semiconductor chip company established by Alibaba Group in September 2018. It was integrated from the acquisition of Zhongtian Microsystems and the internal chip team of Alibaba Damo Institute, and has maintained a low-key operation in the industry. It is known as Alibaba's "nuclear weapon hidden for many years" by the outside world. Now, with the exposure of the listing plan, the Pingtouge chip has officially surfaced.

As the first step before going public, Alibaba plans to internally restructure Pingtouge into a business entity partially owned by employees, and then explore the possibility of conducting an initial public offering (IPO). The specific listing time has not been determined yet, and this action is still in the preparation stage.

Since its establishment 8 years ago, Pingtouge has a full stack product series of end-to-end cloud integration, covering Xuantie processors, Yitian server chips, optical AI chips, etc., and has achieved large-scale production and application, covering fields such as computing, storage, and networking. According to market insiders, Pingtou Ge's self-developed PPU (Processing Unit) has become one of the main chips in China's newly added AI computing power market.

In September 2025, a picture reported by CCTV News of CCTV will give the outside world a glimpse of the strength of Brother Ping Tou. The report screen shows that this GPU chip called PPU has a 96GB HBM2e graphics memory, an inter chip interconnect bandwidth of 700GB/s, PCIe 5.016 interface, and a power consumption of only 400W. In these key parameters, it has completely surpassed Nvidia A800 and mainstream domestic GPUs, and its overall performance is comparable to Nvidia H20.

According to reports, the performance of the first generation PPU developed by Pingtou Ge can rival Nvidia's best-selling H20, while the upgraded PPU has stronger performance than Nvidia A100. Due to its excellent performance, stability, and outstanding cost-effectiveness, Pingtouge PPU chips have a good reputation in the industry and are in high demand in the market. According to agreements signed between China Unicom and four domestic chip suppliers, Pingtouge PPU will provide 16384 computing cards, which have been deployed on a large scale in the Green Energy Intelligent Data Center in Sanjiangyuan, Qinghai.

In terms of product line, Pingtou Brother has formed a full stack layout that integrates end cloud. In the field of data centers, we have launched the Yitian 710 server chip, the Huguang 800 AI inference chip, the PPU AI chip, and the Zhenyue 510 SSD main control chip. The network chip is also reportedly under development. On the terminal side, the dark iron series RISC-V processors are mainly used for edge computing and the Internet of Things, and hundreds of millions of feather array IoT chips have been shipped.

It is worth noting that on September 25, 2019, Pingtou Brother launched what is claimed to be the world's strongest AI chip - the Hikvision 800. In the industry standard ResNet-50 test, the inference performance of the optical 800 reached 78563 IPS, which was four times higher than the best AI chip performance in the industry at that time; The energy efficiency ratio is 500 IPS/W, which is 3.3 times that of the second place.

In addition, Pingtou Brother released Alibaba's first general-purpose server chip, the Yitian 710, at the 2021 Yunqi Conference, which exceeded the industry benchmark by 20% in performance and improved energy efficiency by over 50%. The general-purpose CPU is the brain of computing systems, and its design is one of the most difficult mountains to overcome in the semiconductor industry.

New Variables in International Gaming

The independent listing of Pingtou Ge is not only of great significance to Alibaba, but also will have a profound impact on China's semiconductor industry. As an important layout of Chinese technology giants in the chip field, it will enhance the overall competitiveness of China's AI chip industry and help reduce dependence on foreign technology.

Industry insiders believe that Alibaba and Google will lead the development of AI in China and the United States, as both have full stack layouts from AI chips, cloud computing, large models to AI applications. In Google's AI layout, self-developed chip TPU is an important part. With the start of the listing process, the strength accumulated by Pingtou Brother in the field of underlying chips for many years has finally emerged, and the last piece of the puzzle for Alibaba's AI full stack layout has surfaced.

From a strategic perspective, Alibaba has been expanding in the fields of cloud and AI for a long time, and has a large demand for localized computing power in its business. Separating Pingtou Brother has three benefits: firstly, it reduces internal budget conflicts and allows the chip team to independently connect with external investments; The second is to obtain external references for pricing and valuation through listing, attracting high-end talents; The third is to externalize risks. If research and development fails, costs may not be fully included in the parent company's short-term income statement.

Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming has previously promised to invest over $53 billion in AI infrastructure research and development, and Pingtou Ge may become an important technological pivot for Alibaba to build long-term competitiveness in the AI era. At the same time, the spin off listing may provide Pingtou Brother with greater opportunities in terms of incentive structure, financing capability, and flexibility in external cooperation.

Before that, in addition to Ali, Baidu, another Internet company, had announced the split plan of Kunlun Core. On January 2nd, Baidu (09888. HK) announced that on January 1st, Kunlun Chip had submitted a confidential listing application form (A1 form) to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange through its joint sponsor to apply for approval of Kunlun Chip's listing and trading on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The entry of Alibaba and Baidu also coincides with the current trend of AI chip listings. Domestic GPU companies Muxi Co., Ltd. and Moore's Thread have listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board in December 2025, while Weiren Technology and Tiantian Zhixin, like Kunlun Chip, have chosen to go public in Hong Kong. In addition, Suiyuan Technology's IPO on the Science and Technology Innovation Board has recently been accepted, and Hanbo Semiconductor has completed its guidance for listing on the board.

Some analysts also believe that if Pingtou Ge successfully goes public independently, its significance will go beyond financing itself and set a reference capital coordinate for the hard core transformation of Chinese technology companies. However, this path is destined to be difficult, as the chip industry has huge investments, long cycles, and faces severe international competition and technological blockades. Under the current technological friction between China and the United States, Pingtou Ge's independent listing may face foreign regulation and market entry restrictions. After listing, information transparency may increase, and it may also expose its technological route and partners, becoming a new variable in the international game of AI.