Alibaba unveils new AI chip, calls it China’s most powerful

Investing.com– Alibaba Group (HK:9988) on Tuesday unveiled a new artificial intelligence chip which it touted as China’s most powerful, with the internet giant also announcing plans for a major expansion in data center capacity in the coming years.

Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu unveiled the new chip– the Zhenwu V900 accelerator– at the company’s annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou on Tuesday.

Wu said the V900 triples the performance from its predecessor, and that it can be combined in clusters of up to 500,000 units to train frontier AI models.

“(The Zhenwu V900) is the most powerful AI chip in China today, delivering three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890,” Wu said during his keynote address.

The V900 will be central to Alibaba’s plans to expand its data center capacity to over 20 gigawatts by 2032, Wu said.

The Alibaba CEO also touted Alibaba’s ambition to train an up to 10-trillion parameter AI model, and said that the company’s Qwen team was exploring recursive self-improvement in its models.

Wu said AI-driven customer demand was “exceptionally robust,” and was boosting Alibaba Cloud’s revenue growth.

Alibaba is regarded as one of the foremost Chinese AI developers, with the company having poured tens of billions of dollars into developing its flagship Qwen models.