Alibaba (164news.com on alibaba) Unveils Zhenwu V900: China's Most Powerful AI Chip
Alibaba has announced its new Zhenwu V900 chip as the most powerful AI chip in China, with three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890. Eddie Wu revealed this at the company's annual Apsara cloud conference in Hangzhou on Tuesday.
Key Highlights:
- Mass Production: The V900 will enter mass production in the first quarter of 2027.
- Performance: It handles both high precision model training and ultra low precision inference, offering significant improvements over its predecessor.
- Future Plans: Alibaba aims to develop models with up to 10 trillion parameters and achieve 20GW of data centre capacity by 2032.
What's Inside the V900?
According to a spec sheet published by T-Head, Alibaba's chip design unit, the V900 features:
- 216GB of memory
- 1,200 GB/s of inter-chip interconnect bandwidth
- Support for FP32 down to FP4 natively
- Enhanced Tensor Core arithmetic unit for better precision in FP8 and FP4
- More scaling factor formats and block size configurations under MXFP8 and MXFP4
Future AI Models
Alibaba is also working on the next generation of its Yitian server processors, due in 2027, designed for agentic AI tasks. They aim to reach models with 5-10 trillion parameters, including Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5, building upon their current flagship model, Qwen 3.8 Max (2.4 trillion parameters).
Data Centre Capacity Goals
In a third announcement, Alibaba Cloud set a target to surpass 20GW of global data centre capacity by 2032, addressing supply constraints and potentially driving significant external revenue, according to industry estimates.