Alibaba Cloud, Ant Group, Cambricon and Huawei Come Together in Shanghai to Advance the Open Source AI Stack at PyTorch Conference China

China's leading AI technology companies Alibaba Cloud, Cambricon and Ant Group join the PyTorch Foundation as members

Summary

• Alibaba Cloud and Cambricon joined the PyTorch Foundation as Platinum members, and Ant Group joined as a Gold member.
• The foundation announced the new memberships Sept. 8 at the PyTorch Conference China 2026 in Shanghai. Together these organizations are mapping the future of the PyTorch ecosystem.
• Representatives from the three new member companies and Huawei are delivering keynotes on advancing the open AI stack, covering hardware, models, and infrastructure.

SHANGHAI – KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China 2026 – September 8, 2026 – The PyTorch Foundation, a community-driven hub for open source AI under the Linux Foundation, today announced that Alibaba Cloud and Cambricon have joined the Foundation as Platinum members, and Ant Group has joined as a Gold member. Representatives from Alibaba Cloud, Ant Group, Cambricon, and Huawei are coming together in Shanghai this week, taking the keynote stage at the first-ever KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China 2026 to speak about the open AI stack — the chips and accelerators, open-weight models, frameworks, and infrastructure that carry AI into production.

Together these organizations are mapping the future of the PyTorch ecosystem. During the conference keynotes, Alibaba Cloud's Qwen infrastructure team opens that arc at the platform level, walking through how they serve Qwen at massive scale. Huawei will explore hardware-software co-design and the interoperability needed between Chinese and global AI technology stacks – a foundational question as more accelerators enter production. Cambricon picks up that thread at the chip level, detailing how the company is hardening PyTorch's device-agnostic foundation so any backend can offer broader reach and richer native capabilities. Ant Group turns to the application layer, showing through two linked talks how existing cloud native building blocks like Kubernetes Agent Sandbox and Kata Containers can be assembled into a secure, on-demand runtime for AI agents. Taken together, these keynotes move from silicon to software to deployment, giving conference attendees a full-stack view of how open source is being built into every layer of AI in China.

“Open source has become the default way the world builds AI, and the PyTorch Foundation is a leading hub for this innovation,” said Mark Collier, Executive Director of the PyTorch Foundation. “Welcoming Alibaba Cloud, Cambricon, and Ant Group as members alongside Huawei further strengthens the global open source AI ecosystem and community building the open source intelligence layer developers rely on for training, optimizing, serving, distributing, and running models. PyTorch Conference China brings that community together in Shanghai to continue learning from one another.”

The keynotes coincide with today's announcement that the PyTorch Foundation has welcomed Alibaba Cloud and Cambricon as Platinum members and Ant Group as a Gold member — joining Huawei, a long-standing supporter and contributor to the PyTorch ecosystem. More than 250 organizations across China contribute PyTorch Foundation projects including DeepSpeed, Helion, PyTorch, Ray, Safetensors, and vLLM.

Alibaba Cloud is a global leader in full-stack AI services, offering state-of-the-art intelligent capabilities and a worldwide AI cloud computing network. Qwen, the family of large language and multimodal AI models developed by Alibaba Cloud, has become one of the most influential and widely adopted open-weight model series since its debut in 2023.

Cambricon is a China-based designer of AI chips and accelerators supporting large-scale model training and inference. Cambricon hosts many open source toolkits, drivers, and machine learning pipelines for its Machine Learning Unit (MLU) hardware ecosystem, supporting open development of AI. As Platinum members, Alibaba Cloud and Cambricon are granted one seat on the PyTorch Foundation Governing Board and one seat on the Technical Advisory Council. Both companies will work with the community to strengthen support for hardware and accelerators across the PyTorch ecosystem.

Ant Group is a global digital technology company driving innovation in AI and digital services, actively contributing to open-source ecosystems across cloud-native and AI frameworks. As a Gold member, Ant Group joins the Foundation’s efforts to advance production-grade platforms for AI workloads and deepen collaboration with the broader PyTorch community.

Member Keynotes at PyTorch Conference China include:

• “Serving Qwen at Scale: Multi-Cluster AI Infrastructure on Karmada” delivered by Jionghang Cai, Senior Technical Expert, AI Infrastructure, Alibaba Cloud
• “What AI Agents Need from Open Infrastructure” delivered by Yaya Xia, Open Source Analyst, Ant Group
• “Building an Agent Runtime with Open Infrastructure” delivered by Yaya Xia, Open Source Analyst, and Xu Wang, Vice Chair, Open Source Technology Committee, Ant Group
• “Towards Device-agnostic PyTorch: Building Unified Infrastructure for a Multi-Backend Ecosystem” delivered by Wei Li, Principal Software Engineer, Cambricon
• “Ascend & PyTorch: Pioneer New AI Open Ecosystem” delivered by Liang Zhang, Vice President of Huawei Ascend Computing Product Line, Huawei

Developers and contributors interested in participating in the PyTorch Foundation project ecosystem are encouraged to join the community onsite at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China 2026 (Shanghai, September 7-9). Registration for the upcoming PyTorch Conference North America (San Jose, October 20-21) is now open – register here.

Supporting Quotes

“We believe the future of AI is built on open, production-proven infrastructure — and PyTorch sits at the heart of that future. Joining the PyTorch Foundation is a natural step given our years of running PyTorch at scale across heterogeneous hardware on Alibaba Cloud. We look forward to working alongside the PyTorch Foundation to raise the bar for AI infrastructure and help developers build the next generation of models with confidence.”

– Dr. Feifei Li, Chief Technology Officer, Alibaba Cloud

"AI proves its value through real tasks and real users. We want more people to be able to build with AI and afford to use it. Joining the PyTorch Foundation is another step in Ant Group's long-term participation in global open-source collaboration. We look forward to working with the community to lower the barriers to AI development and adoption through open models, infrastructure and agent technologies."

– Zhengyu He, Chief Technology Officer, Ant Group

“We believe that realizing the full potential of AI computing requires both software-hardware co-optimization and a thriving open ecosystem. Joining the PyTorch Foundation gives us an opportunity to contribute our experience from large-scale AI deployments. We want to work closely with the community to help PyTorch deliver a native, out-of-the-box developer experience across a broader range of backends. We are excited to collaborate with global developers and industry partners to build a truly open and unified AI infrastructure.”

– Elton Gong, Vice President of Software Engineering, Cambricon

"When Huawei joined the PyTorch Foundation in 2023, we came with a goal we still hold today: to help make diverse computing power ubiquitous, and to do that work upstream first. That is what led us to help start the Accelerator Integration Working Group, and what carried Ascend NPU through to becoming the first additional platform in PyTorch. It is a goal that gets easier the more of us are pursuing it, so I'm glad to welcome Alibaba Cloud, Ant Group and Cambricon to the Foundation. We will keep working toward native support for Ascend — native development, native release, native distribution — so that developers get the same PyTorch experience whichever accelerator they reach for."

— Fred Li, Head of Computing Open Source Development Team, Huawei

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About the PyTorch Foundation

The PyTorch Foundation is the vendor-neutral home for the open source intelligence layer developers use for training, optimizing, serving, orchestrating, and running models on any chip in any cloud for any agent. As a community-driven hub hosted by the Linux Foundation, the PyTorch Foundation supports the core PyTorch framework alongside a growing portfolio of innovative projects including vLLM, DeepSpeed, Ray, Helion, and Safetensors. Through open governance, strategic support, and a global contributor community, the PyTorch Foundation empowers developers, researchers, and enterprises to build and deploy AI at scale. Learn more at https://pytorch.org/foundation.

Media Contact

Grace Lucier
The Linux Foundation
pr@linuxfoundation.org