Large-scale Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have become the new paradigm for Natural Language Processing (NLP). PLMs with hundreds of billions parameters such as have demonstrated strong performances on natural language understanding and generation with few-shot in-context learning. In this work, we present our practice on training large-scale autoregressive language models named PanGu-α, with up to 200 billion parameters. PanGu-α is developed under the MindSpore 2 and trained on a cluster of 2048 Ascend 910 AI processors 3 . The training parallelism strategy is implemented based on MindSpore Auto-parallel, which composes five parallelism dimensions to scale the training task to 2048 processors efficiently, including data parallelism, op-level model parallelism, pipeline model parallelism, optimizer model parallelism and rematerialization. To enhance the generalization ability of PanGu-α, we collect 1.1TB high-quality Chinese data from a wide range of domains to pretrain the model. We empirically test the generation ability of PanGu-α in various scenarios including text summarization, question answering, dialogue generation, etc. Moreover, we investigate the effect of model scales on the few-shot performances across a broad range of Chinese NLP tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the superior capabilities of PanGu-α in performing various tasks under few-shot or zero-shot settings.