Alibaba relies on new AI chips and data centers in competition with the USA

Hangzhou. The Chinese technology group Alibaba has presented new chip technologies for artificial intelligence and plans for more powerful models. CEO Eddie Wu said at the annual Alibaba conference in Hangzhou that the new chip “Zhenwu V900” is currently the most powerful AI chip in China. It offers three times the performance of the previous model “Zhenwu M890”.

Alibaba also announced that it wants to train a new AI model with a size of five to ten trillion parameters - a measure of an AI's learning capacity. The aim is to catch up with the most advanced models from the USA.

The company's latest model, Qwen3.8-Max, is the most powerful in the Qwen AI range and features 2.4 trillion parameters. Chinese AI company Moonshot describes its 2.8 trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model, released in July, as the world's largest open model.

Alibaba also unveiled plans to expand the data centers that support the company's cloud computing business. The reason given for this decision was a rapidly increasing demand for computing power for AI applications. The company expects to have computing capacity of more than 20 gigawatts by 2032.

The announcement comes as U.S. AI industry leaders warn of a growing threat from AI development in China. At the same time, industry representatives are calling for a general slowdown in technological development.

Wu also compared the growth of AI to the Industrial Revolution, saying "machine intelligence" will quickly surpass human thinking capacity. He said machines would one day be able to do more than 1,000 times more thinking than all of humanity combined - compared to less than 3 percent today.