Alibaba unveils new chip and ambitious AI model plans

Alibaba unveils new chip and ambitious AI model plans CHAN HO-HIM HONG KONG, CHINA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS PUBLISHED 56 MINUTES AGO COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. China’s Alibaba BABA-N +3.51% increase unveiled new artificial intelligence chip technologies and plans for more powerful models on Tuesday, including what it said was China’s most powerful AI chip, days ahead of a meeting between Chinese and U.S. leaders at which competition to lead on AI technology is expected to be a major theme. Alibaba’s announcement came 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. Chinese leader Xi Jinping is set to arrive in Washington on Wednesday for a state visit and meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, at which AI, trade and tariffs are expected to be discussed. At its annual flagship conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba rolled out a new AI chip and described its plans for the next generation of its AI model. CEO Eddie Wu said the new Zhenwu V900 chip is the “most powerful AI chip in China today” and can deliver three times the performance of the company’s previous generation Zhenwu M890 chip. Such chips power frontier AI model training and “inference,” a term for the calculations a trained AI uses to deliver responses to users. Alibaba’s Zhenwu chips are used in its data centres, providing computing 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, bringing it closer to the most advanced models from the U.S. Its latest Qwen3.8-Max model, the most powerful of its Qwen AI series models, has 2.4 trillion parameters. Chinese AI company Moonshot says that its Kimi K3, released in July, is the world’s largest open model with 2.8 trillion parameters. Alibaba also highlighted plans to expand the data centres that power its cloud computing business, citing “exponentially” rising demand for AI computing. The company said it expects to have over 20 gigawatts’ worth of computing by 2032. SpaceX has approximately 1.4 gigawatts of AI computing capacity as of mid-this year and says it aims to reach over 10 gigawatts in 2027. Recent Chinese advancements in AI are giving Beijing more…