Alibaba Unveils New AI Chip And Data Center Expansion Plan

Alibaba on Tuesday unveiled a powerful new AI chip for training and running models, highlighting the rapid progress in China’s domestic semiconductor capabilities.

During its annual Apsara tech conference, Alibaba said its new AI chip, Zhenwu V900, delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, Zhenwu M890, which was released in May. The V900 is scheduled for mass production and commercial release in the first quarter of next year, it said. Alibaba also plans to launch new central processing units designed for agentic AI workloads, Yitian 720 and Yitian 730, next year.

CEO Eddie Wu said the company aims to boost the total capacity of its data centers around the world to more than 20GW by 2032, as it tries to narrow the gap with U.S. hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Liu Dayiheng, Alibaba’s head of LLM development, said that the company’s next-generation model, Qwen4, is currently in training and will be coming out soon. Liu also announced a roadmap for future generations of models including Qwen4.5 and Qwen5, which are expected to be much larger in size, with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters.

Alibaba’s chip unit, T-Head, has an important role to play as China accelerates its adoption of domestic chips to reduce its dependence on Nvidia. On Sunday, DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng told investors that a major priority for his company is to use more domestic chips to train its models, adding that he expects Huawei Technologies to start delivering training chips to DeepSeek as early as the fourth quarter this year.