Alibaba’s stock climbed roughly 3 percent in Hong Kong trading on Tuesday, after the company took the wraps off a new AI chip and laid out multi-year data-center expansion plans, according to CNBC. The chip, called the Zhenwu V900, follows the Zhenwu M890, which the company put out this past May. Alibaba says the new chip triples the M890’s speed, a performance figure that comes only from the company and lacks independent benchmark confirmation.
The announcement came at Apsara, the annual conference Alibaba’s cloud division holds in Hangzhou. Eddie Wu, the CEO of Alibaba Group, told the audience that machine thinking still has an “enormous growth runway,” comparing today’s AI moment to the early years of electrification. He added a line meant to stick: “AI coding is simply the light bulb of the machine intelligence era.”
Alongside the new chip, Alibaba set a target of pushing Alibaba Cloud’s global data-center capacity above 20 gigawatts by 2032. That goal sits inside a wider roadmap tying together chip design, cloud buildout, and model development, rather than treating them as separate product lines. The Zhenwu V900 will not reach customers right away: Alibaba plans to begin mass manufacturing in the first quarter of 2027, with commercial availability following from that production run.
Alibaba also said its next-gen Qwen 4 model is already in training, while Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 sit further out on the roadmap. That puts three future model releases on the public record before the first one has shipped, a sequencing choice that signals confidence but also invites scrutiny once Qwen 4 actually ships and can be measured against rivals.
CNBC reports more than 650 customers use existing Zhenwu chips across automotive, finance, energy, and manufacturing, giving Alibaba a deployed base to sell the V900 into once it ships.
Alibaba’s push lands inside a broader infrastructure race among AI hardware players. Earlier this month, Nvidia said it had struck partnerships in Australia aimed at building out 2 gigawatts of AI capacity by 2027. Meta, for its part, opened its first Canadian data center in July: a facility in Alberta rated at 1 gigawatt, with an estimated cost near $9 billion and a build timeline running as long as three years. Huawei announced its own infrastructure push last week, claiming it can scale up to one million processors, a direct challenge to Alibaba on home turf.
None of the companies involved, Alibaba included, have published independent third-party benchmarks for these new chips. The performance multiples being quoted, three times for Alibaba and Huawei’s processor count, are self-reported figures meant to shape investor expectations well ahead of any product actually reaching customers.
For operators evaluating China-based cloud and chip suppliers, the real test arrives in 2027, when the Zhenwu V900 ships and can be benchmarked against Huawei’s competing hardware and against Nvidia’s roadmap on cost per inference.
According to CNBC, September 22, 2026.
