Alibaba dropped the news on the evening of Nov 10. It plans to spin off T-Head Semiconductor, its wholly owned chip subsidiary better known as Pingtouge, for a standalone listing on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and the exchange has already confirmed the spin-off can go ahead. Guancha.cn reports that cumulative shipments of T-Head's Zhenwu-series AI chips hit 560,000 units as of April 2026. T-Head is expected to stay an Alibaba subsidiary after the listing.
T-Head has a shorter history than many rivals. It was formed in September 2018, built by folding Alibaba's earlier acquisition of C-Sky Microsystems together with the DAMO Academy chip team. Since then the product lines have crept into core data-center territory, starting with the Guangtong 800 AI inference chip in 2019, followed by the Yitian 710 server CPU in 2021 and the Zhenyue 510 SSD controller in 2023. On the IoT side, the Yuzhen series has shipped hundreds of millions of units. IDC data shows Huawei still led China's cloud AI accelerator market by shipment in 2025 with 812,000 units, while T-Head took second place at 265,000, ahead of Kunlunxin and Cambricon. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu has been blunt about the unit's maturity, saying T-Head is successfully commercialized with annualized revenue above 10 billion yuan.
What makes the listing plausible is the customer base behind those chips. Zhenwu chips serve more than 650 enterprise customers across 20-plus industries, and external commercial customers exceed 60%. The deployments tell the story. More than 130,000 cards have gone into autonomous driving across 30-plus major customers, a list that includes Changan, GAC, BYD, XPeng, NIO and Li Auto, and another 100,000 cards sit in finance. The M890, launched in May, delivers 3x the performance of the previous 810E. The V900 unveiled at September's Apsara Conference is expected to ship in Q1 2027.
T-Head is also stepping into a window that other domestic AI-chip makers have already pried open. Moore Threads, MetaX and Enflame are on the STAR Market, Biren and Iluvatar Core Tech are in Hong Kong, and Baidu's Kunlunxin has started listing tutoring. IFR, a Reuters unit, previously cited sources saying T-Head plans a 2027 Hong Kong IPO raising at least $2-3 billion. J.P. Morgan research puts market valuation expectations in the $25-62 billion range.
The logic cuts both ways. For Alibaba, the listing helps share the group's computing capex and sharpens the valuation of its core business. For T-Head, independence brings a dedicated funding channel plus room to win orders beyond the Alibaba system. Whether this flagship domestic-computing asset lives up to its story will be tested by the exchange's review and the market's pricing.