Chinese telco China Unicom has built a "massive" data center with locally sourced AI chips.

Announced by state broadcaster CCTV and reported on by Reuters, the data center is using chips from Alibaba and other Chinese chip companies.

The data center is the result of around $390 million in investment, and is located in Xining in the Qinghai province.

Details about the size and power capacity of the data center have not been provided.

The local government says it will have 20,000 petaflops of computing capacity once complete, and currently has 3,579 petaflops provided by 23,000 domestically made AI chips.

It has not been stated whether the compute capacity has been calculated based on FP64 (standard for high performance computing, and the rating used for the Top500 supercomputer list) or FP8 (for AI compute).

The majority of the chips were developed by Alibaba's T-Head unit - around 72 percent - and the rest were provided by companies including MetaX, Biren Tech, and Zhonghao Xinying. The data center will, in the future, also house chips from Tecorigin, Moore Threads, and Enflame.

China Unicom, Alibaba, Biren, MetaX, Enflame, Tecorigin, and Zhonghao Xinying did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

Earlier this month, Alibaba revealed it was developing a new AI inferencing chip. The chip is currently in testing and has been manufactured by a Chinese company.

China is pushing for more adoption of locally produced chips. Today, September 17, China's Internet regulator reportedly banned the country's largest tech companies from buying Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips.

It follows a directive issued by the Chinese government in August, mandating publicly owned domestic data center companies to source more than 50 percent of their chips from domestic producers.