Alibaba unveils AI chip to drive 20GW of data centres by 2032

Alibaba Group Holding is rolling out what it calls China’s most powerful AI chip, an accelerator to compete with Nvidia and underpin a massive expansion of data centre capacity in coming years.

The ecommerce company turned AI-aspirant on Tuesday outlined a new Zhenwu V900 accelerator that it says triples the performance of its predecessor. From Alibaba’s T-Head chip division, it can be combined in clusters of up to 500,000 units to power frontier-model training, CEO Eddie Wu said.

Alibaba is among the biggest spenders on AI among leading Chinese players. It’s committed to spending more than US$53 billion over a three-year period to expand its AI capabilities, and raised about US$10.2 billion from a follow-on share offering in Hong Kong in August.

On Tuesday, Wu set a target of 20 gigawatts of data centre capacity for its Alibaba Cloud service by 2032, on the expectation of “exponentially rising demand for AI.”

Wu spoke as global AI stocks rallied on early signs of success for Meta Platforms Inc.’s new personal agent, reviving investor optimism after recent market uncertainty.

Alibaba has pledged to intensify its expenditure on AI hardware and infrastructure as Wu’s leadership team makes the pursuit of artificial general intelligence the company’s lodestar.

It also plans to list the T-Head chip design unit to tap interest in the white-hot AI accelerator market, Bloomberg News has reported.

The company now plans to develop a model with between 5 and 10 trillion parameters, far larger than what’s common today, which would be designed to handle longer and more complex tasks.

The CEO’s plans contrast with recent warnings from top AI labs in the US, after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged a slower pace of development to better handle AI risks.

Alibaba’s event comes on the eve of a summit between US president Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping this week, when the leaders will discuss a swathe of issues.

AI matters are set to figure prominently, as top-level US executives like Nvidia boss Jensen Huang and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will attend a White House state dinner with the national leaders.