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Alibaba opens SAIL to loosen Nvidia’s CUDA grip
Alibaba’s T-Head has open-sourced SAIL, the software stack for its Zhenwu AI chips, aiming to make it easier to move off Nvidia’s CUDA.
Image: TNW
Alibaba’s chip design arm T-Head said at the World AI Conference in Shanghai on Saturday that it is open-sourcing SAIL, the full software stack for its Zhenwu series of AI chips. The goal is straightforward: reduce the cost and complexity for developers moving away from Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem.
According to T-Head, programmers can adapt SAIL to mainstream AI frameworks in under seven days. That matters because most AI developers globally still build with CUDA, Nvidia’s proprietary GPU programming toolkit, which has helped lock software teams into the company’s hardware and contributed to its $3.4 trillion market cap.
The announcement also fits a broader push in China to weaken dependence on foreign AI infrastructure. Xi Jinping used the same conference on Friday to say that no single country should monopolise AI. In that context, opening up SAIL is less about chips alone and more about the software layer that keeps developers tied to Nvidia.
Alibaba is not the only company taking that route. Huawei open-sourced CANN, the software platform for its Ascend AI processors, in 2025, and Moore Threads has been pursuing a similar strategy with its own GPU stack. All three are trying to win the same battle: persuading AI developers to run workloads on Chinese hardware without giving up frameworks such as PyTorch.
That will be difficult. CUDA has a 17-year head start and the industry’s deepest library ecosystem. Still, Alibaba now has scale to build on: it says 560,000 Zhenwu chips have already shipped to more than 400 customers. By making the software layer public, the company is trying to make that ecosystem more durable as it faces pressure elsewhere, including Anthropic’s accusation last month that Alibaba’s Qwen lab carried out the largest AI distillation campaign ever against a US company, and the Pentagon’s decision in June to add Alibaba to its blacklist of Chinese military companies.
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Enterprise Editor
Marcus follows the money. He covers enterprise software, cloud architecture, and the tectonic shifts in Big Tech strategy. He translates dense earnings calls and complex M&A activity into actionable insights about where the industry is actually heading. If a tech giant makes a silent pivot, Marcus is usually the first to notice.
via TNW
