China's Z.ai claims it trained a model using only Huawei hardware

Chinese outfit Zhipu AI claims it trained a new model entirely using Huawei hardware, and that it’s the first company to build an advanced model entirely on Chinese hardware.

Zhipu, which styles itself Z.ai and runs a chatbot at that address, offers several models named General Language Model (GLM). On Wednesday the company announced GLM-Image, that it says employs “an independently developed ‘autoregressive + diffusion decoder’ hybrid architecture, which enables the joint generation of image and language models.” represents an important advance on the Nano Banana Pro image-generating AI.

The post also states that Z.ai developed the model using the Ascend Atlas 800T A2, a Huawei server that can run four Kunpeng 920 processors packing either 64 or 48 cores. Huawei’s processors use Arm cores of its own design.

The servers also use Huawei’s Ascend 910 AI processors.

The most recent Ascend model is 2025’s ...