- Alibaba introduced the Zhenwu V900, its next-generation AI chip, which the company says delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890 released in May 2026. Mass production and commercial release are scheduled for Q1 2027.
- Alibaba Cloud plans to expand global data center capacity to more than 20 gigawatts by 2032 as part of a roadmap spanning chips, cloud infrastructure and AI models.
- Existing Zhenwu chips are used by more than 650 customers across automotive, finance, energy and manufacturing; the next-generation Qwen 4 model is in training, with Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 series planned.
- Alibaba shares jumped around 3% in Hong Kong on the announcement, announced at the Alibaba Cloud Apsara Conference in Hangzhou.
- The buildout comes against competing AI infrastructure plans: Nvidia's work with Australian partners for up to 2 gigawatts of AI infrastructure by 2027, Meta's first Canadian data center at 1 gigawatt in Alberta expected to cost about $9 billion, and Huawei's new AI infrastructure that it says can scale to one million processors.
Quotes
“AI coding is simply the light bulb of the machine intelligence era.”