Alibaba unveils new powerful chip and ambitious AI model plans

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) unveiled new artificial intelligence (AI) chip technologies and plans for more powerful models yesterday, including what it said was China’s most powerful AI chip.

At its annual flagship conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu (吳泳銘) said the new Zhenwu V900 chip is the “most powerful AI chip in China today” and can deliver three times the performance of the company’s previous generation Zhenwu M890 chip.

Such chips power frontier AI model training and “inference,” a term for the calculations a trained AI uses to deliver responses to users. Alibaba’s Zhenwu chips are used in its data centers, providing computing to the company and its cloud clients.

Signage atop the Alibaba Center in Shenzhen, China, on Aug. 26.

Photo: Qilai Shen, Bloomberg

Alibaba also said it plans to train a new AI model at the scale of five to 10 trillion parameters, a measure of an AI’s learning capacity, bringing it closer to the most advanced models from the US. Its latest Qwen3.8-Max model, the most powerful of its Qwen AI series models, has 2.4 trillion parameters.

Chinese AI company Moonshot AI Technology Co (月之暗面) says that its Kimi K3, released in July, is the world’s largest open model with 2.8 trillion parameters.

Alibaba also highlighted plans to expand the data centers that power its cloud computing business, citing “exponentially” rising demand for AI computing. The company said it expects to have over 20 gigawatts’ worth of computing by 2032.

SpaceX has approximately 1.4 gigawatts of AI computing capacity as of mid-this year and says it aims to reach over 10 gigawatts next year.

Recent Chinese advancements in AI are giving Beijing more leverage in its upcoming talks with Washington, some analysts believe, as China steps up its self-reliance push even as US-led export restrictions have barred it from accessing some of the world’s most cutting-edge technologies, including AI chips and chipmaking machines.

Open Chinese models, which are often more affordable than cutting-edge closed models from leading US AI labs, have also been making inroads globally, including in the US.

Chinese technology giant Huawei Technologies Co (華為) last week also unveiled new chip technologies as it looks to challenge global leaders like Nvidia Corp. Frontier AI model training in China often rely on Nvidia chips, analysts said, but Chinese-designed chips are gaining ground as Nvidia has been blocked from selling some of its most powerful AI chips to China.

“Using extra computing power to make up for chip limits helps China stay strong locally,” Counterpoint Research vice president Neil Shah said in Hong Kong.

Counterpoint senior analyst Parv Sharma added that how much the AI and chipmaking gap between China and the US narrows will also depend on other factors including China’s ability to advance chip foundries that manufacture them, not just chip design capabilities.

Alibaba is “mobilizing every resource” to meet customers’ demand for AI, Wu said in his speech.

Global shortages across the AI data center supply chain, for example, “are currently limiting the speed at which we can scale our compute infrastructure” for AI, he added.

Wu also likened AI growth to the industrial revolution and said “machine intelligence” will rapidly outgrow human thinking capacity.

While “machine intelligence today is not a substitute for human intelligence,” he predicted that, eventually, machines will be able to produce over 1,000 times more “thinking” than all of humanity combined, up from less than 3 percent currently.