Alibaba has unveiled a new artificial intelligence chip that it says is the most powerful in China. The company also shared plans to build larger AI models and expand its data centers.
The announcements came Tuesday at Alibaba's annual flagship conference in Hangzhou. The news arrived just days before a meeting between Chinese and U.S. leaders.
Alibaba Launches Zhenwu V900 Chip
CEO Eddie Wu said the new Zhenwu V900 is the "most powerful AI chip in China today." He said it can deliver three times the performance of the company's previous Zhenwu M890 chip.
Chips like these are used to train advanced AI models. They also handle "inference," which is the work a trained AI does to answer users.
Alibaba uses its Zhenwu chips in its own data centers. They provide computing power to the company and to its cloud customers.
Alibaba also said it plans to train a new AI model with five to 10 trillion parameters. Parameters are a measure of an AI's learning capacity.
Its current top model, Qwen3.8-Max, has 2.4 trillion parameters. Chinese AI company Moonshot says its Kimi K3, released in July, is the world's largest open model at 2.8 trillion parameters.
Data Center Growth and Chip Limits
Alibaba plans to expand the data centers behind its cloud business. The company cited "exponentially" rising demand for AI computing and expects to have over 20 gigawatts of computing by 2032.
For comparison, SpaceX had about 1.4 gigawatts of AI computing capacity as of mid-year. It aims to reach over 10 gigawatts in 2027.
Wu said global shortages across the AI data center supply chain are limiting how fast Alibaba can scale. He said the company is "mobilizing every resource" to meet customer demand.
U.S.-led export rules have blocked China from getting some advanced AI chips and chipmaking machines. Nvidia has been barred from selling some of its most powerful AI chips to the country.
Huawei also unveiled new chip technologies last week. Analysts said AI training in China often relies on Nvidia chips, but Chinese-designed chips are gaining ground.
"Using extra computing power to make up for chip limits helps China stay strong locally," said Neil Shah, vice president of Counterpoint Research.
Counterpoint senior analyst Parv Sharma said China's progress will also depend on its ability to improve chip foundries, not just chip design.
Wu compared AI growth to the industrial revolution. He predicted machines will one day produce over 1,000 times more "thinking" than all of humanity combined, up from less than 3% today.
Some U.S. AI leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, have warned that China's AI progress poses a threat to the United States. They have called for an overall slowdown in AI development.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is set to arrive in Washington on Wednesday for a state visit with President Donald Trump. AI, trade and tariffs are expected to be discussed.
