Investors would get a separately priced stake in a Chinese AI chip maker serving over 650 enterprise customers, while Alibaba keeps control of it after the listing.
Alibaba Group plans to spin off T-Head, its wholly owned chip design unit, and list it separately on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. In an announcement dated November 10, Alibaba said T-Head had submitted its listing application on Form A1 on a confidential basis on September 11, 2026, and that the exchange had confirmed under Practice Note 15, its rulebook for spin-offs by listed companies, that Alibaba may proceed. The offering would be a global sale of T-Head H shares, combining a Hong Kong public offering with a placing to institutional and professional investors.
The terms that matter most to investors are still open. Alibaba said the size and structure of the offering, and the reduction in its own shareholding, have not been finalized, and that T-Head is expected to remain its subsidiary after the listing. The deal still needs approval from the exchange’s Listing Committee and completion of a filing with the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). The company wrote that "there is no assurance that the Proposed Spin-off will take place," and, as Investing.com noted, it gave no timetable.
The announcement formalizes a plan that has circulated since January. Caixin reported on January 23 that Alibaba would spin off T-Head for an independent listing, and that Alibaba’s shares had risen 5.03% in premarket trading in New York on January 22, when the plan was confirmed. Ten months later, T-Head arrives at the exchange with a product line already in volume shipment and sold commercially through Alibaba Cloud.
T-Head brings a data-center chip line with 560,000 AI accelerators shipped
Alibaba describes T-Head as "a leading provider of full-stack data center chips which enable system-level compute solutions in China." The unit was founded on September 19, 2018, according to the 21st Century Business Herald. Its products, as listed by The Paper, span the Zhenwu (真武) AI chip series, the Yitian (倚天) server processors, ICN interconnect chips, Panmai (磐脉) smart network cards and Zhenyue (镇岳) storage controllers.
T-Head’s Zhenwu AI chips had reached cumulative shipments of 560,000 units by April 2026. That figure was reported by 36Kr, and The Paper reported that the chips serve more than 650 enterprise customers in over 20 industries. The 21st Century Business Herald said the current Zhenwu M890 is deployed commercially through Alibaba Cloud, with customers in autonomous driving, internet services and financial services, and that it handles the full cycle of AI work from training and fine-tuning to inference.
The next generation is already announced. Hong Kong’s The Standard reported that T-Head unveiled the Zhenwu V900 in September, which Alibaba says is the most powerful AI chip in China by computing performance. The V900 offers three times the performance of the M890, can be linked in clusters of up to 500,000 chips for training frontier models, and is expected to enter mass production and reach the market in the first quarter of 2027.
Hong Kong’s exchange waived Alibaba shareholders’ assured entitlement
Practice Note 15 normally requires a parent company to give its own shareholders an assured entitlement to shares in the business being spun off, either by distributing shares directly or by giving them priority in the offering. The exchange granted Alibaba a waiver. Alibaba argued that the cost would be disproportionate, partly because US securities law would require a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and that a direct distribution would be impractical under Chinese legal and operational restrictions, including lock-ups on shares issued before the offering. It also said the spin-off is small relative to Alibaba’s total assets, revenue and net income.
That last point carries a disclosure consequence. Alibaba expects the highest applicable size ratio under the Listing Rules to be below 5%, so the spin-off would not count as a discloseable transaction, and it does not expect the deal to affect its dual primary listing in Hong Kong and New York. Alibaba’s stated reasons for the listing are that investors could value the retained group and T-Head separately, and that T-Head would gain its own access to customers, partners, equity investors and bank credit.
Outside estimates of the deal’s scale vary widely. The Standard cited International Financing Review as reporting that the listing could raise US$2 billion to US$3 billion. The 21st Century Business Herald quoted a professional investment institution putting T-Head’s valuation at US$20 billion to US$30 billion, and said JPMorgan analysts had estimated US$25 billion to US$62 billion in January using a rough benchmark method. None of these figures comes from Alibaba.
Listing Committee approval and a CSRC filing come before any prospectus
T-Head follows Baidu’s chip unit Kunlunxin, which Caixin reported filed for a Hong Kong listing on January 2, 2026; EastFrontier covered Kunlunxin’s Hong Kong IPO plans in June. Two of China’s largest technology groups are therefore putting their in-house AI chip businesses in front of public investors in the same market.
For Alibaba shareholders, the waiver means there is no reserved allocation of T-Head stock; exposure would come through Alibaba’s continuing stake or by buying in the offering. The first detailed look at T-Head’s revenue, margins and customer concentration, including how much of its business depends on Alibaba Cloud, will come only when a prospectus is published. The Listing Committee’s decision and completion of the CSRC filing are the two approvals to watch before that happens.