Alibaba unveils Zhenwu V900 AI chip and announces new model — Taipei Times
China’s Alibaba Group Holding unveiled new artificial intelligence chip technologies at its annual conference in Hangzhou, including the Zhenwu V900, which the company called China’s most powerful AI chip. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said the new product delivers three times the performance of the previous-generation Zhenwu M890 chip.
As Taipei Times reports, Zhenwu chips are used in Alibaba’s data centers for computing needed by the company itself and its cloud service customers. They are designed for training advanced AI models, as well as inference — performing computations through which an already trained model generates responses for users.
Model with 5–10 trillion parameters
Alibaba also announced its intention to train a new AI model with 5 to 10 trillion parameters. Parameters are an indicator of a model’s learning capacity. The current most powerful model in the Qwen series, Qwen3.8-Max, has 2.4 trillion parameters.
China’s Moonshot AI Technology, for its part, calls the Kimi K3 released in July the world’s largest open model, with 2.8 trillion parameters. Open Chinese models, which often cost less than the advanced closed products of leading US AI laboratories, are expanding their presence globally, including in the United States.
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Expansion of data centers
The company plans to expand its network of data centers for its cloud business amid what it estimates to be exponential growth in demand for AI computing capacity. Alibaba expects to have more than 20 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2032.
Eddie Wu said Alibaba is mobilizing all resources to meet customer demand for artificial intelligence technologies. At the same time, he noted that a global shortage in the supply chain for AI data centers is currently limiting the pace at which the company can scale its computing infrastructure.
Chinese chip developers are strengthening their positions as US export restrictions have blocked supplies to China of some of the most powerful AI chips and equipment for their production. Counterpoint Research Vice President Neil Shah said additional computing capacity is helping China offset chip restrictions in its domestic market.
