Alibaba unveiled the Zhenwu V900 AI chip, which it says has three times the performance of its previous chip, with mass production planned for early 2027.

What Alibaba announced

Alibaba set out its AI plans at the Apsara Conference, Alibaba Cloud's yearly technology event, in Hangzhou, China, on 22 Sep 2026. Group Chairman Joe Tsai and CEO Eddie Wu spoke. The plans cover chips, cloud services, Qwen models and AI agents.

About the Zhenwu V900 chip

T-Head, Alibaba's chip design unit, makes the Zhenwu V900 for both training and running AI models. Alibaba says it has three times the performance of the Zhenwu M890, the chip before it. The V900 has 216 GB of memory, links to other chips at 1,200 GB/s and supports the FP8 and FP4 number formats. Mass production and commercial release are planned for the first quarter of 2027.

A new "supernode" server combines the V900 with T-Head's networking and storage chips, and can link up to 500,000 chips in one cluster. Alibaba says its Zhenwu chips already serve more than 650 customers in areas such as cars, finance, energy and manufacturing. T-Head also showed two server processors, the Yitian 720 and Yitian 730, due in 2027.

Models and data centres

Alibaba says Qwen 4 is in training, and that later versions, Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5, are planned to grow to 5 to 10 trillion parameters. It also showed new speech, translation and image models. One of them, Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate, does live interpretation, and Alibaba says it cut the delay from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds.

Alibaba set a goal for the data centres that Alibaba Cloud runs around the world to pass 20 GW of capacity by 2032. The release gives no investment amount and no prices. All the figures are Alibaba's own claims and have not been checked independently.