Z.AI's Use of Chinese Chips for New Model is About Optimization

Chinese AI vendor Z.ai said it used 100,000 China-made chips to handle online queries to its latest AI model, GLM-5.3 Flash.

The move shows how Chinese vendors are reducing their dependence on U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, while also highlighting the trend toward greater optimization of AI models.

The new open-weight, multimodal model is low-cost, with 320 billion parameters. Z.ai originally previewed the model under the code name Ox Alpha on August 20 and officially released it under the MIT open source license on August 26. The model is specialized for long-context processing, vision-driven agentic tasks and code synthesis.

GLM-5.3 Flash costs $0.075 per million input tokens and $0.25 per million output tokens from now until Sept. 9. After that, the price will be $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens. Comparatively, GPT-5.6 Luna from OpenAI costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens. Anthropic Claude Opus 5 is $5 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens.

The Chinese vendor’s decision to use purely Chinese chip providers comes as China aims to rely less on Nvidia. China’s pivot toward self-reliance comes after years in which the U.S. tightened export controls to prevent Chinese tech vendors from obtaining the most powerful Nvidia chips. Although some of these controls have eased, in September 2025, China’s government ordered tech giants such as Alibaba and ByteDance to stop buying Nvidia AI chips, and in November, Beijing banned all foreign AI chips from state-funded data centers.

The Advancement of Chinese Hardware

Despite these moves, many observers still saw China as behind in the infrastructure contest. However, Z.ai’s strategy suggests that the gap between China and the U.S. in AI chips may be narrowing, especially with the increased focus on inference over the past year amid the sharp rise of agentic AI.

The Model

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