Alibaba Group Holding is rolling out what it calls China’s most powerful AI chip, an accelerator to compete with Nvidia and underpin a massive expansion of data centre capacity in coming years.
The e-commerce company turned AI aspirant on Sept 22 outlined a new Zhenwu V900 accelerator that it says trebles the performance of its predecessor. From Alibaba’s T-Head division, it can be combined in clusters of up to 500,000 units to power frontier-model training, chief executive officer Eddie Wu said.
Alibaba is one of the biggest spenders on artificial intelligence among leading Chinese players. It is committed to spending more than US$53 billion (S$67.6 billion) over a three-year period to expand its AI capabilities, and raised about US$10.2 billion from a follow-on share offering in August.
The Hangzhou-based tech giant has pledged to intensify investment in AI hardware and infrastructure as Wu makes the pursuit of artificial general intelligence the company’s lodestar.
On Sept 22, he declared plans to develop models with between five and 10 trillion parameters, far larger than what is common today, for longer and more complex tasks. He then set a target of 20 gigawatts of data centre capacity for the Alibaba Cloud service globally by 2032 – a big expansion that Citigroup estimates could drive more than US$160 billion of external revenue for the fast-growing division.
That speed of development contrasts with recent warnings from top AI labs in the US, after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged a slower pace to better handle the risks.
Wu’s declaration – on the eve of a historic summit between US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping – suggests Alibaba has no intention of throttling down. Its shares leapt more than 5 per cent in Hong Kong, while WeChat operator Tencent Holdings surged more than 7 per cent.
“Last year, we asserted that the more capable AI becomes, the more powerful humanity will be,” Wu said. “Today, I remain steadfast in that conviction.”
Alibaba’s 20GW blueprint – while giant for a Chinese company – is relatively smaller than some of the world’s more ambitious build-outs. SoftBank Group for instance envisions a 10 gigawatt-scale computing centre in Ohio, alone.
While showcasing Alibaba’s full stack of proprietary chips, cloud services and AI models, Wu fell short of addressing whether the firm can produce enough silicon in the short term to meet surging domestic demand, especially with Nvidia’s cutting-edge chips restricted in China.
It remains unclear whether Alibaba is working with domestic chipmakers – such as capacity-constrained Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp – but US export controls largely block Chinese firms from using market leaders like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Alibaba’s event comes just before Trump and Xi meet to discuss a swathe of issues. AI matters are set to figure prominently, as top-level US executives like Nvidia boss Jensen Huang and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella attend a White House state dinner.
Talks got under way last weekend between US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng, where the two sides agreed to set up a dialogue on AI aimed at reaching a common understanding on goals and threats.
That is despite Washington accusing Alibaba and other leading developers like DeepSeek of “illicitly accessing” American cutting-edge models to help develop their own products. Beijing has rejected such accusations as groundless and vowed to retaliate if Washington moves to target Chinese AI companies.
Alibaba – until recently better known as the operator of the Taobao and T-mall marketplaces – has created the world’s most popular AI model by downloads. The company has since rapidly expanded its Qwen series, while keeping pricing low to entice users. That has come at a cost, however, as the company saw profit plunge by more than 75 per cent in the last quarter, after a nearly US$10 billion spending spree.
The company’s executives have in recent times talked about how its AI investment is increasingly bearing fruit, with annualised revenue from AI-related products expected to reach US$10 billion in the current quarter. Alibaba should be able to recoup its overall investment within a three-year period, Wu’s team has said. It also aims to quintuple annual cloud and AI revenue to US$100 billion in five years.
Alibaba – which last unveiled a new AI chip in May – plans to update that line-up every year. They are designed to work in giant clusters to drive performance, a strategy widely adopted by Chinese chipmakers from Huawei Technologies to Moore Threads Technology.
T-Head, which is angling for a stock market listing, has delivered 560,000 units of the Zhenwu product family, and its processors have been deployed by more than 400 external customers, Alibaba has said. BLOOMBERG
