At the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai on Saturday, Alibaba Group Holding’s chip design unit, T-Head, announced it will open-source its proprietary software stack, making the full technical stack of SAIL – the foundational software architecture for the unit’s Zhenwu series of AI chips – freely available to international developers starting on the same day. This move targets the dominance of American chip giant Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem, as Chinese AI chipmakers including Huawei Technologies and Moore Threads Technology promote open, collaborative software alternatives to Nvidia’s industry-standard CUDA toolkit. T-Head stated its initiative aims to lower the barrier for international developers seeking to adopt its hardware, noting programmers could adapt the SAIL stack to mainstream AI frameworks in less than seven days. In 2025, Huawei pursued a similar strategy by open-sourcing its Compute Architecture for Neural Networks (CANN) for its Ascend AI processors.