- New card targets large-scale AI clusters
- Aims to address growing network constraints
Pingtouge, the chip arm of Alibaba Group, has launched its first smart network interface card (NIC) as it moves to tackle data transfer bottlenecks in large-scale AI computing.
The product, named Panmai 920, was unveiled at the 2026 Digital China Summit on April 28 and is the country’s first 400G smart NIC with a built-in PCIe switch.
It supports up to 400 Gbps throughput and is designed for AI training clusters, general computing infrastructure and high-performance storage.
The card has entered mass production and will be deployed first in Alibaba Cloud data centers.
Surging token usage
The launch comes as demand for AI computing accelerates sharply. China’s daily token usage surpassed 140 trillion in March 2026, rising more than a thousandfold in two years, according to National Data Administration.
While computing power has expanded rapidly, network infrastructure has lagged, creating a “communication wall” that constrains overall system efficiency.
Panmai 920 incorporates a proprietary chip and uses PCIe 5.0 and 112G PAM4 Ethernet, with packet processing rates reaching 400 million packets per second.
It also introduces multi-path Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), addressing the limitations of traditional single-path designs and helping reduce training and inference times.
Additional features include programmable congestion control and fine-grained network sensing to mitigate traffic bottlenecks.
Chip-level architecture
The card integrates a chip-level network architecture with an onboard PCIe switch, enabling low-latency direct connections to GPUs and SSDs while reducing reliance on external switching hardware, cutting system costs by about 30%.
“If computing power is the oil of the AI era, then networking is the pipeline,” said Li Xuhui, product director at Pingtouge, also known as T-Head. “Computing provides the power, while networking ensures efficiency—only together can effective performance be realized.”
The launch expands T-Head’s portfolio of data center chips, which now includes its Zhenwu AI processors, Yitian Arm-based server CPUs, Panmai smart NICs and Zhenyue storage controllers, covering computing, networking and storage infrastructure.
