Alibaba Cloud plans six-year stroll to 20GW of datacenters, reveals chip to power them
USA alone has 37GW under construction, but Alibaba doesn't think the AI boom will run out of steam
Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant, has announced plans to expand its datacenter fleet to 20 gigawatts of capacity over the next six years. At the Apsara conference, CEO Eddie Wu likened early AI applications to light bulbs, but emphasized that AI will eventually drive 99.9% of all cognition, much like steam and combustion engines revolutionized physical work after their initial introduction.
Wu compared AI to steam engines, explaining that just as engines have become the primary source of physical labor, AI will eventually handle most cognition tasks. He hinted at the potential for AI to create millions of "AI scientists and domain experts" constantly pushing the boundaries of technology. Alibaba Cloud plans to build its share of this infrastructure by scaling its global datacenter fleet to 20GW, with a large portion going towards the Stargate project, which aims to bring 10GW online by 2029.
Alibaba's own Zhenwu V900 chip, described as the most powerful AI chip in China today, will be utilized for frontier model training and inference in its giant clusters.
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