Booth of Zhipu at the exhibition hall of the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference on July 28, 2025 Photo: VCG

Chinese AI startup Zhipu AI said that its newly launched GLM-5.3-Flash, the first native multimodal model in its GLM-5 series, is served entirely by 100,000 domestically produced chips, underscoring China's push to build large-scale AI infrastructure using homegrown semiconductors.

The company said that GLM-5.3-Flash has been officially released as an open-source model under the MIT license. It supports a 1-million-token context window and is built with a 300-billion-parameter architecture. Zhipu AI said the model can be deployed on all domestically-produced AI chips, according to information shared with the Global Times on Thursday.

In benchmark testing, the model scored 57 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, on par with Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8. Zhipu AI also said GLM-5.3-Flash is priced at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, around one-tenth of GLM-5.3 and roughly one-fortieth of Claude Opus 4.8.

Before its official debut, the GLM-5.3-Flash model was tested anonymously as Ox Alpha — known as "Niu Lai" in Chinese developer circles — on overseas platforms OpenRouter and OpenCode, where it recorded 62 trillion tokens in usage and swept to the top of online usage charts over the week, with all request traffic backed by domestic-chip computing power.

In its technical documentation shared with the Global Times, Zhipu said its inference service ran on a cluster of more than 100,000 domestic chips and that "hardware efficiency and per-token cost have reached a level comparable to that of mainstream Nvidia GPUs."

"This proves that domestic chips can fully and efficiently support frontier-model inference in large-scale scenarios," the company said.
Semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis commented on X that with every request carried by domestic silicon at Nvidia-comparable efficiency, "the CUDA moat is once again being tested," following OpenAI's announcement of its in-house Jalapeño inference chip. 

Chinese media outlet LatePost reported the chips may come from Huawei, Moore Threads and Hygon, though Zhipu AI would not confirm the suppliers or models.

The latest development highlights growing competition in the global AI model market, as Chinese developers increasingly seek to prove both technical capability and large-scale deployment capacity using homegrown semiconductor infrastructure, according to industry analysts.

As of press time on Thursday, Zhipu AI's Hong Kong-listed shares rose more than 6.3% in morning trading.

Global Times