Alibaba unveils new AI chip

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud arm of tech giant Alibaba Group, has unveiled a new artificial intelligence chip and an ambitious multi-year semiconductor roadmap, as the company pushes to build a domestic alternative to Nvidia-powered AI infrastructure.

Alibaba Cloud launched the Zhenwu M890, a new training-and-inference integrated AI chip developed by the company's semiconductor arm T-Head, also known in Chinese as Pingtouge.

Alibaba said the Zhenwu series has already shipped more than 560,000 units cumulatively, serving over 400 customers across more than 20 industries, including telecom, automotive and finance. Clients include China Telecom, FAW Group and SPD Bank.

The company also outlined its next generation of chips, saying it plans to roll out the more powerful Zhenwu V900 and Zhenwu J900 over the next two years to meet rising demand for computing power in the "agentic AI" era, where autonomous AI systems are expected to handle increasingly complex industrial and enterprise tasks.

Alongside the processor, Alibaba introduced an ICN Switch interconnect chip and a 128-card AI supernode server capable of linking 128 AI chips with latency in the hundreds of nanoseconds.

The company said the architecture allows the processors to function "like a single chip," marking one of the first attempts by a Chinese company to deliver a fully integrated AI infrastructure solution spanning processors, networking and clustered computing systems.

Wednesday's news comes as Chinese technology firms race to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers such as Nvidia following United States' export controls on advanced AI semiconductors.