Alibaba Cloud, Cambricon join PyTorch Foundation board

Alibaba Cloud and Cambricon have joined the PyTorch Foundation as Platinum members, while Ant Group has joined at Gold level. Their arrival adds three Chinese technology groups to the open-source artificial intelligence body alongside existing member Huawei.

Alibaba Cloud and Cambricon gain seats on the PyTorch Foundation Governing Board and Technical Advisory Council. Ant Group joins as the foundation expands the roster of companies involved in developing the PyTorch software ecosystem.

PyTorch is one of the most widely used open-source machine learning frameworks, and the new memberships highlight the growing role of Chinese companies in the AI software stack, from models and chips to deployment tools. More than 250 organisations across China already contribute to projects in the foundation's orbit, including PyTorch, DeepSpeed, Ray, Safetensors, Helion and vLLM.

Huawei, which joined earlier, remains a visible participant in that effort. All four companies appeared together in Shanghai, where executives and engineers discussed the open AI stack, from semiconductors and accelerators to model infrastructure and runtime systems.

Board seats

For Alibaba Cloud and Cambricon, Platinum membership brings formal influence over governance and technical direction. Both are expected to work with other members on support for different hardware platforms and accelerators across the PyTorch ecosystem.

That is a central issue for AI developers seeking to run models across a wider mix of chips. PyTorch has long been closely associated with Nvidia-based computing, but growing demand for alternatives has pushed chipmakers and infrastructure providers to deepen their involvement in the software layers that determine how easily researchers and companies can use their hardware.

Cambricon, a Chinese designer of AI chips and accelerators, is positioning itself directly in that debate. It said it supports an open development model around its Machine Learning Unit hardware with toolkits, drivers and machine learning pipelines.

Alibaba Cloud approached the announcement from the infrastructure side. At the Shanghai gathering, its engineers discussed how the company serves Qwen, its family of large language and multimodal models, across large-scale systems.

Ant Group focused further up the stack, on software tools for AI agents and secure runtime environments built with cloud-native components such as Kubernetes Agent Sandbox and Kata Containers. That reflects a broader push to adapt existing cloud software for AI workloads rather than build entirely separate systems.

Open stack

The membership changes also show how competition in AI is increasingly shaped by open-source software communities as much as by proprietary models. Companies are trying to influence the common tools used to train, distribute and run models, especially as more businesses seek flexibility across cloud environments and processor types.

Mark Collier, Executive Director of the PyTorch Foundation, commented on the new members.

"Open source has become the default way the world builds AI, and the PyTorch Foundation is a leading hub for this innovation. 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," said Collier.

Each of the new members framed its decision as part of a broader open-source AI strategy.

"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," said Dr. Feifei Li, Chief Technology Officer at Alibaba Cloud.

Ant Group linked its membership to practical adoption and lower barriers for developers.

"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," said He.

Cambricon stressed the link between hardware design and software integration.

"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," said Gong.

Huawei welcomed the additions while reiterating its own work inside the foundation on broader accelerator support.

"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," said Li.