Brother Pingtou broke into the Hong Kong stock market in eight years, and the computing power and capital behind Alibaba’s spin-off

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Brother Pingtou broke into the Hong Kong stock market in eight years, and the computing power and capital behind Alibaba’s spin-off

TechPulse

2026.11.11 13:26

· From Hebei

Full text 2701 words

On the evening of November 10, Alibaba Group announced that it had submitted to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange a proposal to spin off its wholly-owned subsidiary Pingtou Ge (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd. for independent listing in accordance with Application Guideline 15 of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Listing Rules. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange has confirmed that the company can carry out the spin-off.

The announcement shows that Pingtou Ge has submitted an A1 listing application form to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in a confidential form on September 11, 2026, applying for the listing and trading of its H shares on the main board of the Stock Exchange.此次分拆拟通过全球发售平头哥H股的方式进行，包括香港公开发售及向机构和专业投资者配售。 The specific size of the IPO has not yet been finalized.

After the spin-off is completed, Pingtouge will still be a subsidiary of Alibaba. This entity, established in 2018 and carrying all of Alibaba's self-developed chip business, is being pushed into the Hong Kong stock market with a "separate but not separated" attitude.

Eight years after its establishment, Pingtouge accelerates external commercialization

In 2018, Alibaba integrated the acquired Zhongtian Microsystems with the self-developed chip team of DAMO Academy to establish Pingtouge Semiconductor. At that time, the company was named after "Pingtou Ge", a honey badger who "bears a pessimistic view on life and death and will do anything if he refuses to accept it." The outside world regarded it more as Alibaba's early adopter in the field of Internet of Things chips. The Xuantie series RISC-V processors and Feather series SoC chips were all its business cards to the outside world.

Eight years later, Pingtou Ge’s product landscape has completely changed. Zhenwu series AI chips, Etian series server CPUs, Zhenyue series storage main control chips, ICN interconnect chips, and Panmai smart network cards cover the three core aspects of the data center: computing power, storage, and network.

In addition, Pingtouge also jointly launched the Zhenwu super node based on self-developed chips with Alibaba Cloud, providing a system-level computing power base for the training and reasoning of large models with trillions or even ten trillion parameters.

From an industrial perspective, there are currently not many domestic companies with full-stack self-research capabilities for "Sucun.com". This is also the strongest card in Pingtouge's IPO narrative. Alibaba positioned it as "China's leading full-stack data center chip supplier" in its announcement.

In March this year, Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming disclosed a set of key data. In Alibaba Cloud's actual business scenarios, more than 60% of Pingtouge chips serve external commercial customers and support the AI tasks of more than 400 enterprise customers.

As of April 2026, the cumulative shipments of Pingtouge Zhenwu series AI chips have reached 560,000 pieces. Alibaba's financial report released in August showed that Zhenwu series chips have been commercialized through Alibaba Cloud and used by more than 650 external customers in more than 20 industries such as autonomous driving, the Internet, and financial services, becoming one of China's self-developed AI chips with the most widely used scenarios.

According to the calculation of the shipment scale of domestic AI chip companies, the shipment scale of Pingtou Ge Zhenwu series has firmly ranked first in the domestic AI chip echelon. Behind this is the result of Alibaba’s saturation investment in the past few years, and it has also stepped into the market window where domestic AI chips are in short supply. As the United States continues to tighten export controls on AI chips, domestic cloud manufacturers and AI companies accelerate independent innovation, and Pingtou Ge, who has large-scale delivery capabilities, has become one of the biggest beneficiaries.

Alibaba’s AI investment surges, Pingtou seeks independent financing

Why is Alibaba pressing the spin-off button now?

The official statement in the announcement gave two reasons: first, to allow investors to more clearly assess the business value of Alibaba’s retained group and allow the market to independently identify Ping Tou Ge’s business performance and development potential; second, to enhance Ping Tou Ge’s independent image among customers, suppliers and potential strategic partners, and enhance its ability to independently enter the equity and debt capital markets.

A more realistic situation is that Alibaba is fighting on two fronts. On the one hand, Pingtou Ge continues to invest in production capacity and research and development, and on the other hand, the group's own cash flow is being squeezed by AI capital expenditures.

At the strategic level, Alibaba has repeatedly emphasized the "chip-model-cloud" collaborative AI strategy in the past year. Pingtou Ge, who has the ability to deliver self-developed chips on a large scale, is one of Alibaba's core competitiveness in the AI battlefield.

At the capital level, the accounts are equally clear. Chips are a high-investment, long-cycle industry, and Alibaba itself is at the peak of its AI capital expenditures. The latest financial report shows that in the June quarter of 2026, Alibaba’s single-quarter capital expenditure reached 67.678 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 75%; the net free cash flow outflow was 44.670 billion yuan, compared with a net outflow of 18.8 billion yuan in the same period last year.

Looking at the entire fiscal year 2026, its cash flow from operating activities was 76.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 53%, and free cash flow changed from a net inflow of 73.9 billion yuan in the previous year to a net outflow of 46.609 billion yuan. In August this year, Alibaba also completed the allotment of new shares worth HK$80 billion, with 100% of the net amount invested in full-stack AI capabilities and AI infrastructure.

After the spin-off and listing, Pingtou Ge can directly access the capital market as an independent identity and obtain equity and debt financing. Pingtou Ge’s financing no longer has to squeeze into the same hole as the group’s other businesses. This not only provides money for the chip business, but also makes room for the group’s balance sheet.

The best year for the AI chip industry?

Since the beginning of this year, domestic AI chip companies such as Tianshu Zhixin and Biren Technology have been listed one after another; previously, Moore Thread only took 88 days from the submission of its prospectus to the meeting, setting a record for the fastest review of AI chip companies on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, becoming the "first domestic GPU stock."

In terms of major Internet companies, Kunlun Core, a subsidiary of Baidu, also submitted a listing application in a confidential form at the beginning of the year. It is worth mentioning that in response to recent rumors that the launch of Kunlun Core may be delayed, Baidu responded on November 3 that relevant market rumors and reports were untrue.

Compared with these pioneers, Pingtouge's scarcity lies in the fact that it is one of the very few AI chip assets in China that has completed the full-stack layout of "Success Network" and has achieved large-scale external commercial delivery. For institutional investors focusing on semiconductors and AI computing power, such a target did not exist in the Hong Kong stock market before.

For domestic AI chip companies, 2026 will be a year of intensive listings. In overseas markets, although the chips of major manufacturers have not been spun off, they have become a driving force for the parent company’s capital market and commercialization to a large extent. It can be said that the AI chip industry has collectively ushered in the best year.

For example, Google's self-developed AI chip TPU. In October 2025, Anthropic announced plans to expand its use of Google Cloud and use up to 1 million TPUs. In April this year, the two parties further expanded their cooperation, and the new computing power will be delivered through Google Cloud services and Google's self-developed TPU provided by Broadcom.

Amazon has also deployed a number of self-developed chip product lines, including Graviton CPU for general computing, and Trainium for AI training and inference. Also in April this year, Amazon expanded its cooperation with Anthropic, which will receive up to 5 gigawatts of computing power covering current and future generations of Trainium chips. The two parties also disclosed that Anthropic will provide feedback from Claude’s training load to the Amazon chip team to participate in future product optimization.

From Google TPU to Amazon Trainium, self-developed chips are becoming part of cloud vendors’ efforts to win AI customers. The needs of the model company enter the chip iteration process, and the chip capabilities are delivered to customers through cloud services. Brother Pingtou also hopes to follow the same path.

The suspense is left to the valuation. Pingtou Ge’s revenue scale, gross profit margin, pricing of related transactions with Alibaba Cloud, and the order elasticity of Zhenwu Super Node in the trillion-parameter model era will all become the most watched parts of its hearing materials. In this wave of AI chip launches, Pingtou Ge may provide an anchor as to how the market will ultimately price domestic computing power.

In any case, Pingtou Ge's entry into the Hong Kong stock market in eight years marks the first time that the self-developed chip assets of China's major Internet companies have truly come to the forefront. The chip business has never been just a battle of technology, but also a long-distance race for capital, ecology and endurance. (This article was first published on Titanium Media APP, text | TechPulse)

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