Shares in Chinese company Alibaba rose 5.1% on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Tuesday after the company unveiled new artificial intelligence chip technology and said it was developing a model up to four times the size of its flagship model.
Chip delivers more than three times the performance of its predecessor
Alibaba Chief Executive Eddie Wu said at the company’s annual conference in Hangzhou, China, that the Zhenwu V900 chip was “the most powerful among China’s artificial intelligence chips today” and delivered more than three times the performance of the previous-generation Zhenwu M890 chip.
Mass production of the Zhenwu V900 chips and their commercial launch are scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2027. Wu said the company expected “significant growth” in its annual artificial intelligence chip shipments.
Alibaba launched its previous-generation M890 chips in May, as Chinese technology companies compete to develop domestic alternatives to the artificial intelligence chips produced by US company Nvidia, amid tighter US restrictions on chip exports.
Models with up to 10 trillion parameters
Alibaba said it planned to train a new artificial intelligence model at a scale of 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters. The company’s current flagship model, Qwen 3.8 Max, contains 2.4 trillion parameters.
The company said in a separate statement that it was currently training the next-generation Qwen 4 model, while its future Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 models were expected to reach between 5 trillion and 10 trillion parameters.
Expanding cloud-computing capacity
Wu said Alibaba aimed to increase the capacity of its global cloud data centres to more than 20 gigawatts by 2032, pointing to “enormous” demand for artificial intelligence computing.
Wu said that “truly leading products for the artificial intelligence era have yet to emerge,” likening the current phase to “the dawn of an era comparable to the Industrial Revolution.” He predicted that machines would ultimately produce more than 1,000 times the level of human “thinking,” compared with less than 3% today.
Technological competition between China and the United States
Alibaba’s announcement came days before Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump were due to meet in Washington, with competition for leadership in artificial intelligence technology expected to be one of the main topics of discussion.
The announcement followed warnings from US artificial intelligence officials, including Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei, that China’s development of artificial intelligence posed a threat to the United States, along with calls to slow the pace of development of the technology.
