Alibaba shares traded higher on Wednesday after reports that the company secured China Unicom as a major client for its AI chips. Bloomberg said the contract will see Alibaba’s Pingtouge accelerators deployed in a new data center in northwestern China, alongside chips from MetaX and Biren Technology. Visuals suggest Alibaba is deploying tens of thousands of AI chips in Unicom’s datacenters to compete with Huawei’s Ascend series and Cambricon Technologies. Alibaba has committed about $53.5 billion over three years to expand its AI infrastructure and reduce reliance on Nvidia’s designs.