Alibaba unveiled its Zhenwu V900 artificial intelligence accelerator and plans for much larger Qwen models on Tuesday at its annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, China. The company described the processor as China's most powerful AI chip and said it delivers three times the performance of its Zhenwu M890 predecessor, a claim that has not yet been independently benchmarked.
The V900, designed by Alibaba's T-Head semiconductor unit, is intended for both training models and running inference, the calculations a trained system performs when answering users. Alibaba said the accelerator has 216 gigabytes of memory, inter-chip bandwidth of 1,200 gigabytes per second and support for FP8 and FP4 numerical formats used to reduce computing demands.
Alibaba said the processor can operate in clusters of as many as 500,000 cards when combined with its networking, storage and server technology. Mass production and commercial release are scheduled for the first quarter of 2027. The company said chips in the Zhenwu family already serve more than 650 customers in sectors including automobiles, finance, energy and manufacturing.
Alongside the hardware, Alibaba said Qwen 4 is in training and outlined future Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 systems that could contain between 5 trillion and 10 trillion parameters. Its current Qwen3.8-Max flagship has 2.4 trillion parameters. Parameter counts indicate model scale but do not by themselves establish accuracy, efficiency or safety.
Chief Executive Eddie Wu also set a goal for Alibaba Cloud to operate more than 20 gigawatts of global data-center capacity by 2032. Reuters reported that Wu described customer demand for AI as exceptionally strong while acknowledging supply-chain constraints. Alibaba said commercial deployment of its AI supernodes would begin at scale during the current quarter.
The announcements intensify competition over the chips, models and cloud infrastructure behind generative AI. They arrive as Chinese companies seek domestic alternatives to advanced Nvidia processors amid tighter United States export controls. The next test will be whether Alibaba meets its 2027 production timetable and whether independent users confirm the performance and cost advantages it presented in Hangzhou.
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