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Alibaba Group, the leading Chinese internet company, unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) chip dubbed the Zhenwu V900 on Tuesday, declaring it the most powerful AI chip in China today. CEO Eddie Wu made the announcement at the company’s annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou. Wu highlighted that the V900 triples the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890.
The Zhenwu V900 chip can be combined in clusters of up to 500,000 units, enabling the training of frontier AI models. Alibaba plans to expand its data center capacity to over 20 gigawatts by 2032, with the V900 playing a central role in this expansion.
Beyond the chip's capabilities, Wu also announced that Alibaba’s Qwen team was exploring recursive self-improvement in its models. The company aims to train a 10-trillion parameter AI model, showcasing its ambition in AI development. AI-driven customer demand has been exceptionally robust, contributing significantly to Alibaba Cloud’s revenue growth.
Alibaba has been at the forefront of AI development in China, investing billions of dollars in creating its flagship Qwen models. This AI investment, however, impacted the company's recent quarterly earnings, resulting in a 75% drop in net profit due to margin compression. Alibaba Cloud and compute revenue, however, saw a sharp rise in the June quarter.
Despite the financial impact, Alibaba's Hong Kong shares surged 4% on Tuesday following the AI chip announcement.
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