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Industry 2026-08-13

Alibaba opened its 2.4-trillion-parameter model on Wednesday. Builds for eight Chinese chips were already waiting.

Alibaba opened its 2.4-trillion-parameter model on Wednesday. Builds for eight Chinese chips were already waiting.

When Alibaba finished publishing the weights of Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B on Hugging Face, the FlagRelease account run by Beijing's state-backed AI academy posted ready-to-run versions for nine different accelerators — Huawei Ascend, Moore Threads, Baidu's Kunlunxin, Hygon, MetaX, Enflame, Tsingmicro and one more domestic vendor, alongside Nvidia — in INT8 and FP8. The upload history shows the work started before the launch: the weight files for the Nvidia build went up on 11 August, a day before Alibaba's own repository was finished. The academy says it has done same-day chip ports for twelve open models since February.

Why it mattersThe hard part of using Chinese accelerators has never been the silicon; it is that each new model needs weeks of porting before it runs on anything but Nvidia. A shared open-source stack that ships day-zero builds for eight domestic chips at once removes that lag, and it quietly turns every new Chinese open model into an argument for buying domestic hardware. It also shows how closely the model labs and the chip effort are now coordinated: someone had the weights before the public did.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

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