Alibaba reveals its latest AI chip, the Zhenwu V900, and plans a major expansion of its cloud data centres, signalling a strategic move to compete across AI hardware, infrastructure, and model development amid escalating global rivalry.
Alibaba has stepped up its artificial intelligence push with a new chip, a larger cloud build-out and fresh model plans, signalling that the Chinese group wants to compete not only in software but in the infrastructure that powers large-scale AI systems. Shares in Hong Kong rose after the announcements, which were made at the company’s Apsara Conference in Hangzhou.
The centrepiece was the Zhenwu V900, Alibaba’s latest AI chip, which the company said delivers about three times the performance of its earlier Zhenwu M890. Alibaba said the new chip is due for mass production and commercial launch in the first quarter of 2027. Reporting from Data Centre Dynamics and TrendForce indicates that the previous M890 generation had already been positioned for training and inference workloads, with memory and bandwidth specifications designed for large model processing.
Alibaba also outlined an aggressive expansion of Alibaba Cloud’s global data centre capacity, setting a target of more than 20 gigawatts by 2032. That would mark a significant deepening of its infrastructure investment at a time when global technology companies are racing to secure more computing power for AI training and deployment. The company’s existing Zhenwu chips are already being used by more than 650 customers across sectors including automotive, finance, energy and manufacturing, according to Alibaba’s presentation.
On the model side, the company said its next-generation Qwen 4 system is in training, and it sketched out follow-on Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 lines. CNBC reported that chief executive Eddie Wu described machine intelligence as still being in an early phase, comparing its growth potential with the beginnings of electrification. Alibaba’s wider message was clear: it intends to compete across the stack, from chips and cloud capacity to frontier model development, as Chinese rivals such as Huawei also accelerate their own infrastructure plans.
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