Alibaba Unveils Powerful AI Chip Amidst Global Tech Competition

China’s Alibaba announced new artificial intelligence chip technologies and plans for more powerful AI models on Tuesday, including what it claims is China's most powerful AI chip. The company's announcement comes days before a meeting between Chinese and U.S. leaders where competition in AI technology is anticipated to be a significant topic.

At its annual flagship conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba revealed the Zhenwu V900 chip, which CEO Eddie Wu described as the "most powerful AI chip in China today." According to Wu, the new chip offers three times the performance of the company's previous generation Zhenwu M890 chip. These chips are essential for training advanced AI models and for "inference," the process by which trained AI delivers responses to user queries. Alibaba utilizes its Zhenwu chips in its data centers to provide computing power to the company and its cloud clients.

Alibaba also detailed plans to develop a new AI model with a scale of five to 10 trillion parameters, a metric indicating an AI's learning capacity. Its current Qwen3.8-Max model, the most advanced in its Qwen series, possesses 2.4 trillion parameters. For comparison, Chinese AI company Moonshot's Kimi K3 model, released in July, is stated to be the world's largest open model with 2.8 trillion parameters.

The company also plans to expand its data centers, which support its cloud computing services, in response to what it called "exponentially" rising demand for AI computing. Alibaba projects having over 20 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2032. This expansion plan comes as SpaceX aims to reach over 10 gigawatts of AI computing capacity by 2027, having approximately 1.4 gigawatts as of mid-2024.

Recent advancements in AI by Chinese companies are seen by some analysts as potentially strengthening Beijing's position in upcoming talks with Washington. This comes even as U.S.-led export restrictions have limited China's access to some of the most advanced technologies, including AI chips and chipmaking equipment. Open Chinese AI models, often more affordable than closed models from leading U.S. AI labs, have been gaining traction globally, including in the United States.

Earlier last week, Chinese technology firm Huawei also unveiled new chip technologies, signaling its intent to compete with global leaders such as Nvidia. Alibaba's CEO Wu stated that the company is "mobilizing every resource" to meet customer demand for AI, while also noting that global shortages in the AI data center supply chain are currently constraining the speed of scaling its compute infrastructure for AI.

Wu likened the growth of AI to the industrial revolution, predicting that "machine intelligence" will rapidly surpass human thinking capacity. While acknowledging that current machine intelligence does not substitute for human intelligence, he forecast that machines could eventually produce over 1,000 times more "thinking" than all of humanity combined, a significant increase from the current less than 3%.