Alibaba reveals more powerful Zhenwu AI chip, new LLM

CHONGQING, China — Alibaba on Wednesday announced a new artificial intelligence chip that is three times more powerful than its predecessor, adding to China’s domestic AI chip options as Nvidia struggles to get its products into the country.

The Zhenwu M890 delivers three times the performance of the current Zhenwu 810E, Alibaba said, adding that the new processor has 144 GB GPU memory and interchip bandwidth of 800 GB per second.

The e-commerce and technology giant said it had already delivered 560,000 Zhenwu units to more than 400 customers across 20 industries.

The new chip could make Alibaba and its chip subsidiary T-Head more competitive in China’s growing domestic AI processor market, which includes competitors like Huawei and Cambricon.

“Alibaba designed AI chips are making headway with external customers and are becoming one of the more popular platforms among Chinese domestic AI hardware chips,” said Myron Xie, an analyst at SemiAnalysis with a focus on AI accelerators.

However, he noted that the advertised memory capacity and bandwidth figures are still lagging behind those of major Western chip companies. Alibaba has yet to release other important metrics such as compute performance, Xie added.

Chinese AI developers have long been restricted from buying cutting-edge processors from companies such as Nvidia due to American export restrictions.

Beijing has also tightened scrutiny on domestic companies’ use of foreign AI chips, including Nvidia’s H200 chip, despite Washington recently clearing their sale in China.

“Given that Nvidia remains out of China … [it is] unlikely that Nvidia will be a long-term supplier into all of China,” said Leonid Mironov, portfolio manager at Gavekal.

Alibaba’s chip announcement also suggests investors should not discount Alibaba and Tencent, Mironov said. The two companies are the largest holdings in his newly launched China fund.

“Alibaba is also keeping pace and doing really well with T-head,” he said.

The Zhenwu will give local tech companies another option, although questions remain over how much manufacturing capacity Alibaba can continue to secure at local semiconductor foundries such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, according to Counterpoint Research Associate Director Brady Wang.

“M890 is a small but real contribution to China’s AI self-sufficiency … On raw silicon power, M890 is not a true competitor to H200. But it does not need to be. In the China market, it is a believable replacement for H200,” Wang added.

Alibaba’s latest AI processor could also help support the computing demands of its Qwen large language models. The company is widely considered a “full-stack AI company,” due to its business spanning across hardware, computing, AI models, tools and applications.

Alibaba also revealed on Wednesday that its next-generation AI model, Qwen3.7-Max, would soon be released.

In early April, Alibaba and China Telecom said they were launching a data center in southern China powered by the e-commerce giant’s own chips.

— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.