China's Alibaba Group Holding unveiled Zhenwu V900, an artificial intelligence accelerator it developed in-house. Alibaba said the chip can be linked in clusters of up to 500,000 units to train frontier models, declaring a direct challenge to Nvidia.
Alibaba introduced the new AI accelerator at its Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, China, on Sept. 22, according to Bloomberg. The company claimed the chip is the most powerful AI chip in China, with performance more than three times that of its previous model.
Alibaba Chief Executive Eddie Wu also announced plans to develop models with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters. That scale far exceeds what is currently in common use and is aimed at handling longer and more complex tasks. Qwen 3.8-Max, which Alibaba released in August, has 2.4 trillion parameters. Wu also set a target of expanding Alibaba Cloud's global data center capacity to 20 gigawatts by 2032. Citigroup projected the data center expansion would generate more than $160 billion in revenue.
Alibaba is considered the biggest spender on AI among major Chinese companies. It has committed more than $53 billion over three years to build out AI capabilities and raised about $10.2 billion through an additional share issue in August.
