5 minBusiness
Alibaba Unveils Zhenwu V900 AI Chip Ahead of Xi-Trump Meeting
Alibaba introduced the Zhenwu V900, calling it China's most powerful AI chip, and outlined plans for a 5-10 trillion parameter model and 20 gigawatts of computing by 2032, days before Xi Jinping meets Donald Trump in Washington.
Alibaba unveiled a new artificial intelligence chip and detailed plans for more powerful AI models on Tuesday, claiming the Zhenwu V900 is the most powerful AI chip in China today. The announcement came at the company's annual flagship conference in Hangzhou, just days before Chinese leader Xi Jinping is scheduled to arrive in Washington for a state visit and a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, where AI, trade and tariffs are expected to be central topics.
CEO Eddie Wu said the Zhenwu V900 delivers three times the performance of Alibaba's previous generation Zhenwu M890 chip. Such chips power frontier AI model training and inference, the calculations a trained AI uses to respond to users. Alibaba's Zhenwu chips are deployed in its data centers, providing computing power to the company and its cloud clients.
Alibaba also said it plans to train a new AI model at the scale of five to 10 trillion parameters, a measure of an AI's learning capacity. That would bring it closer to the most advanced models from U.S. labs. Its latest Qwen3.8-Max model, the most powerful in its Qwen series, has 2.4 trillion parameters. Chinese AI company Moonshot says its Kimi K3, released in July, is the world's largest open model with 2.8 trillion parameters.
The company highlighted plans to expand the data centers that power its cloud computing business, citing exponentially rising demand for AI computing. Alibaba said it expects to have over 20 gigawatts' worth of computing by 2032. For comparison, SpaceX has approximately 1.4 gigawatts of AI computing capacity as of mid-this year and aims to reach over 10 gigawatts in 2027.
Recent Chinese advancements in AI are giving Beijing more leverage in its upcoming talks with Washington, some analysts believe, as China steps up its self-reliance push even as U.S.-led export restrictions have barred it from accessing some of the world's most cutting-edge technologies, including AI chips and chipmaking machines. Open Chinese models, often more affordable than cutting-edge closed models from leading U.S. AI labs, have also been making inroads globally, including in the U.S. Chinese technology giant Huawei last week also unveiled new chip technologies as it looks to challenge global leaders like Nvidia.
Frontier AI model training in China often relies on Nvidia chips, analysts said, but Chinese-designed chips are gaining ground as Nvidia has been blocked from selling some of its most powerful AI chips to China. «Using extra computing power to make up for chip limits helps China stay strong locally,» said Neil Shah, vice president of Counterpoint Research, a technology market research firm based in Hong Kong. Counterpoint senior analyst Parv Sharma added that how much the AI and chipmaking gap between China and the U.S. narrows will also depend on other factors including China's ability to advance chip foundries that manufacture them, not just chip design capabilities.
Alibaba is «mobilizing every resource» to meet customers' demand for AI, CEO Wu said in his speech Tuesday. Global shortages across the AI data center supply chain, for example, «are currently limiting the speed at which we can scale our compute infrastructure» for AI, he added. Wu also likened AI growth to the industrial revolution and said «machine intelligence» will rapidly outgrow human thinking capacity. While «machine intelligence today is not a substitute for human intelligence,» he predicted that eventually machines will be able to produce over 1,000 times more «thinking» than all of humanity combined, up from less than 3% currently.
The announcements come as U.S. AI leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, are warning that China's development of AI poses a threat to the United States and calling for an overall slowdown on development of the technology. The timing of Alibaba's event, just before Xi's state visit, underscores how AI competition is increasingly intertwined with trade and diplomatic tensions between the world's two largest economies.
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