Alibaba unveils new AI chip, plans trillion-parameter model

Alibaba Group ↗ 2.22% announced plans to train an AI model with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters and unveiled what it calls China's most powerful AI chip, marking an ambitious expansion of the company's artificial intelligence ambitions.

A New Chip and a Massive Model

Chief Executive Eddie Wu made the announcements on Tuesday at the company's annual Apsara Conference in China, outlining a sweeping push across AI models, chips, and data center infrastructure. The new Zhenwu V900 accelerator, developed by Alibaba's T-Head chip division, delivers three times the performance of its predecessor and can be clustered in groups of up to 500,000 units to power frontier-model training, according to Bloomberg.reuters+1

The chip positions Alibaba as a direct competitor to Nvidia ↗ 2.30% in the accelerator market, at a time when U.S. export controls have limited Chinese companies' access to the most advanced American-made AI hardware.

Data Center Expansion

Alongside the chip and model announcements, Alibaba said it aims for Alibaba Cloud's global data center capacity to surpass 20 gigawatts by 2032. The target underscores the scale of infrastructure investment the company believes is necessary to support the next generation of AI workloads.bloomberg+1

China's AI Race Intensifies

The announcements come as Chinese technology companies race to close the gap with U.S. rivals in AI development. A model with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters would represent a substantial leap beyond today's largest publicly known models. Whether Alibaba can deliver on the timeline and scale remains to be seen, but the commitments signal that the company intends to compete at the frontier of AI research and infrastructure rather than rely on foreign suppliers.