Alibaba has announced plans to list its semiconductor business T-Head on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, in a move that will allow the subsidiary to scale independently.

The Chinese tech giant said that an independent public offering (IPO) for T-Head would help investors to better assess T-Head’s value “on its own merits” and attract interest from investors specifically interested in semiconductor exposure.

It added that a Hong Kong listing would allow T-Head to solicit more business and independently secure funding for its operations.

The listing was confidentially submitted on 11 September, Alibaba said, and remains subject to regulatory approval by the China Securities Regulatory Commission.

Alibaba has not set a date for the IPO nor provided details of its offer or size.

T-Head, known as Pingtouge in China, began operations in 2018 following Alibaba’s acquisition of the CPU designer C-Sky Microsystems. Since that time, Alibaba has spent billions of dollars on expanding its infrastructure businesses and sought to establish T-Head as a serious Chinese alternative to US chip firms Nvidia and AMD.

The subsidiary’s product lineup includes the Zhenwu chip family which it uses for inferencing its open-source AI model Qwen. In September, it announced the Zhenwu V900 chip, which outpaces Nvidia’s H200 chip at 216 GB of onboard memory, native FP8 and FP4 support and support for clusters of up to 500,000 chips.

Set to launch in the first quarter of 2027, the Zhenwu V900 will be used to train multi-trillion parameter Qwen models and will compete directly with Huawei’s Ascend 960T chip. With a majority share of the domestic chip market, Huawei is T-Head’s largest competitor.

In the first half of 2026 T-Head held a 7 per cent share of China’s AI chip market, per data from TradingView.

Alibaba’s decision comes amid rising unrest for Nvidia. Its chief executive and founder Jensen Huang resigned this week after admitting to an affair with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based data company Megaspeed who the New York Times reported is considered a Chinese asset by US intelligence agencies.

With an internal investigation ongoing at Nvidia and Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives calling for a probe into the Trump administration’s China export policy, the future of Nvidia chip sales in China is uncertain.

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