Alibaba is flogging a beefier AI chip as China’s cloud crowd tries to dodge Nvidia-shaped export headaches.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Hangzhou outfit said on Wednesday that the next generation of its high-end Zhenwu chip series, the M890, is three times more powerful than its predecessor.
Alibaba claimed the chip is “exceptionally” well-suited for complex agentic AI workloads that require ample working memory. The company also pushed out an update to its flagship Qwen large language model, built for more advanced agentic coding and fiddly reasoning jobs.
The announcements landed at a conference in Hangzhou, after earnings showed Alibaba’s profitability is still taking a kicking. AI spending has dragged on the group’s profitability in recent quarters, although the suits reckon the bill will eventually look clever.
Chinese AI startups, including Moonshot AI and MiniMax, are charging into large language models with plenty of swagger. Tech incumbents such as Alibaba and Baidu are trying to build the whole AI stack, from models to chips, rather than just renting someone else’s toys.
The company said on a recent earnings call that scaling up its in-house chips represented “the highest value for money compute power.”
Alibaba said that should improve margins at its cloud segment, where AI is meant to stop being a cash bonfire and start earning its keep. Alibaba chief executive Eddie Wu said earlier this month that AI-related product revenue should become the main growth driver for cloud.
At the conference, Alibaba said it had delivered 560,000 Zhenwu units to date. The chips are widely used in China. The new Zhenwu M890 has 144GB of GPU memory, up from 96GB on its predecessor, giving it room for much larger data loads.
The previous version mainly focused on model inference, while the new one supports both model training and inference. Chinese chipmakers have sped up their offerings as Beijing pushes for tech independence and Washington keeps tightening the screws.
Alibaba was long a major customer of Nvidia. Now, domestic chip designers are filling the gap left after Nvidia ran into regulatory barriers on its most advanced kit in China. Several Chinese chip companies, including Biren Technology and MetaX, have been listed in mainland China and Hong Kong in recent months.
