Alibaba Cloud, Cambricon Join PyTorch Foundation, Ant Group Takes Gold Seat

The PyTorch Foundation said Alibaba Cloud and Cambricon have joined as Platinum members and Ant Group has joined as a Gold member, a grouping the organization framed around the open AI stack at its conference in Shanghai. The foundation announced the new memberships on September 8, 2026, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China 2026, where representatives from all three new members and existing member Huawei took the keynote stage.

The announcement, published by the PyTorch Foundation, centers on the chips and accelerators, open-weight models, frameworks, and infrastructure that carry AI into production. The event itself ran September 7-9, 2026, in Shanghai, and marked the first time the KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, OpenInfra Summit, and PyTorch Conference China communities convened on a single stage.

Membership Tiers and Governance Seats

As Platinum members, Alibaba Cloud and Cambricon are each granted one seat on the PyTorch Foundation Governing Board and one seat on its Technical Advisory Council. Ant Group joined at the Gold tier. The three join Huawei, which the foundation described as a long-standing supporter and contributor to the PyTorch ecosystem.

The foundation said both Platinum companies will work with the community to strengthen support for hardware and accelerators across the PyTorch ecosystem. The PyTorch Foundation operates as a community-driven hub for open source AI under the Linux Foundation.

Mark Collier, Executive Director of the PyTorch Foundation, said the additions build on the foundation’s role. “Open source has become the default way the world builds AI, and the PyTorch Foundation is a leading hub for this innovation,” Collier said. He added that welcoming the three companies alongside Huawei strengthens the global open source AI ecosystem building the intelligence layer developers rely on for training, optimizing, serving, distributing, and running models.

What Each Member Brings

Alibaba Cloud is a full-stack AI services provider whose Qwen family of large language and multimodal models has been released as open-weight models since its 2023 debut. Cambricon is a China-based designer of AI chips and accelerators for large-scale model training and inference, and it hosts open source toolkits, drivers, and machine learning pipelines for its Machine Learning Unit hardware ecosystem. Ant Group is a digital technology company that contributes to open-source ecosystems across cloud-native and AI frameworks.

The foundation said more than 250 organizations across China contribute to PyTorch Foundation projects, which include DeepSpeed, Helion, PyTorch, Ray, Safetensors, and vLLM.

Keynotes Span Silicon to Deployment

The member keynotes were organized to move from silicon through software to deployment. Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen infrastructure team opened at the platform level with a talk on serving Qwen at scale across multiple clusters. Huawei addressed hardware-software co-design and interoperability between Chinese and global AI technology stacks. Cambricon focused on the chip level, detailing work to harden PyTorch’s device-agnostic foundation so any backend can offer broader reach and richer native capabilities. Ant Group turned to the application layer, showing across two linked talks how existing cloud native building blocks such as Kubernetes Agent Sandbox and Kata Containers can be assembled into a secure, on-demand runtime for AI agents.

The scheduled member keynotes were “Serving Qwen at Scale: Multi-Cluster AI Infrastructure on Karmada” by Jionghang Cai of Alibaba Cloud; “What AI Agents Need from Open Infrastructure” and “Building an Agent Runtime with Open Infrastructure” by Yaya Xia and Xu Wang of Ant Group; “Towards Device-agnostic PyTorch: Building Unified Infrastructure for a Multi-Backend Ecosystem” by Wei Li of Cambricon; and “Ascend & PyTorch: Pioneer New AI Open Ecosystem” by Liang Zhang of Huawei.

Executive Statements

Dr. Feifei Li, Chief Technology Officer of Alibaba Cloud, said joining was a natural step given the company’s years of running PyTorch at scale across heterogeneous hardware. Zhengyu He, Chief Technology Officer of Ant Group, described the move as part of the company’s long-term participation in global open-source collaboration and said it aims to lower barriers to AI development through open models, infrastructure, and agent technologies.

Elton Gong, Vice President of Software Engineering at Cambricon, said the company wants to help PyTorch deliver a native, out-of-the-box developer experience across a broader range of backends. Fred Li, Head of Computing Open Source Development Team at Huawei, noted that Huawei joined the foundation in 2023 with a goal of making diverse computing power ubiquitous, and credited that effort with helping start the Accelerator Integration Working Group and carrying the Ascend NPU through to becoming the first additional platform in PyTorch.

The co-located conference, held at the Shanghai International Convention Center, brought together the communities behind three of the most active open source projects in the world: Kubernetes, OpenStack, and PyTorch.