Alibaba has unveiled its Zhenwu V900 AI accelerator as China’s chipmakers continue trying to loosen Nvidia’s grip on artificial intelligence hardware.
Alibaba chief executive Eddie Wu showcased the chip at Alibaba Cloud’s annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou. The company’s T-Head semiconductor operation developed it and claims it delivers three times the performance of the previous-generation M890.
According to Reuters, Alibaba reckons the V900 can be connected in clusters containing as many as 500,000 accelerators, which should be enough silicon to make even the most enthusiastic AI accountant develop a nervous twitch.
The company said the chip supports training and inference workloads and will enter mass production and commercial release during the first quarter of 2027.
Alibaba is pitching the V900 as the most powerful AI processor developed in China. That claim will need independent benchmarking before anyone starts engraving trophies, but domestic accelerators have become increasingly important as US export restrictions make access to Nvidia’s most capable hardware more difficult.
Wu used the same event to outline plans for considerably larger Qwen models. Alibaba is training Qwen 4, while later Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 systems are expected to grow to between five trillion and 10 trillion parameters. Its current flagship Qwen 3.8 Max has 2.4 trillion parameters.
The company said the larger models are intended to tackle “more complex, longer-horizon tasks” while it pursues systems capable of increasingly autonomous work. Alibaba claims its researchers have made progress on models that identify weaknesses, run experiments, and produce training data with less human involvement.
All that silicon and machine thinking will need somewhere to live. Alibaba wants the global data-centre capacity operated by Alibaba Cloud to exceed 20 GW by 2032, with commercial deployment of its AI supernodes beginning this quarter.
Wu said customer demand for AI was “exceptionally robust”, although supply-chain constraints were limiting how quickly Alibaba Cloud could expand.
Investors apparently liked the prospect of filling warehouses with accelerators. Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares climbed 5.1 per cent on Tuesday, reaching their highest level in a month,
