Chinese tech giant Alibaba unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) chip on September 22, calling it "the most powerful AI chip in China."
According to local media, including the China Securities Journal, Alibaba introduced its next-generation AI chip, the Zhenwu (真武) V900, at the 2026 Winchi Conference, part of the Alibaba Cloud Developer Conference held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. The chip was developed by Alibaba's semiconductor division, T-Head.
Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming stated that the V900's performance is three times that of its predecessor, the M890, and it can be configured into clusters of up to 500,000 chips for advanced AI model training and inference.
Bloomberg noted that the V900 is designed to compete with Nvidia's AI accelerators.
Recently, Alibaba has been expanding its AI chip and cloud data center capabilities to strengthen its AI computing infrastructure.
Wu announced a goal to increase the global data center capacity operated by Alibaba Cloud to over 20 gigawatts by 2032. He also revealed plans to develop next-generation AI models with 50 trillion to 100 trillion parameters to handle more complex and long-term tasks.
"Given the strong customer demand for AI, we will focus all our efforts on building infrastructure," Wu emphasized, committing to continued investments in AI models, chips, and cloud computing. He added, "Our belief that as AI becomes more powerful, humanity will also become stronger has not changed."
Alibaba's aggressive investment in AI contrasts with recent warnings from major U.S. AI companies about slowing the pace of AI development. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, argued for a slowdown in advanced AI development to address associated risks, a sentiment echoed by industry leaders like Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
Alibaba is one of the largest investors in AI among China's major tech firms. The company previously announced plans to invest over 380 billion yuan (approximately $77 billion) over three years to enhance its AI capabilities. Last month, it raised about $10.2 billion (around 13.8 trillion won) through a new share issuance in Hong Kong. According to Bloomberg, Alibaba is also pursuing an initial public offering (IPO) for T-Head to attract investor interest in the AI chip market.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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