SHENZHEN, CHINA – AUGUST 31: The Alibaba logo is illuminated on the roof of an office building in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China on August 31, 2026. Alibaba is accelerating investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure, chips and models as the Chinese tech giant looks to expand its cloud and AI business amid intensifying global competition. (Photo by Chen Xin/Getty Images)
Chen Xin | Getty Images News | Getty Images
shares of alibaba Shares rose about 3% in Hong Kong on Tuesday after the Chinese tech giant unveiled new artificial intelligence chips and plans to significantly expand its data center footprint and step up bets on the infrastructure that will fuel the AI boom.
Alibaba announced the Zhenwu V900, a next-generation AI chip that delivers three times the performance of the previous generation Zhenwu M890 released in May, at the Apsara Conference, the cloud sector’s annual flagship conference, held in Hangzhou.
The company also announced plans to expand Alibaba Cloud’s global data center capacity to more than 20 gigawatts by 2032 as part of a broader roadmap across chips, cloud infrastructure, and AI models.
The announcements highlight Alibaba’s push into the machines behind the AI boom, as competition for computing power intensifies and Western technology peers invest in AI infrastructure.
Earlier this month, NVIDIA outlined plans to work with Australian partners to support up to 2 gigawatts of AI infrastructure in the country by 2027. Meanwhile, Meta announced plans for its first data center in Canada in July. The 1-gigawatt facility in Alberta is expected to cost about $9 billion and take up to three years to complete.
Alibaba’s new Zhenwu AI chip is scheduled for mass production and commercial release in the first quarter of 2027. The company’s existing Zhenwu chips are already in use by more than 650 customers across industries such as automotive, finance, energy, and manufacturing.
The company also said that the next generation Qwen 4 model is currently in training and outlined plans for the future Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 model series.
Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu said machine thinking still has a “huge growth runway” and compared today’s AI developments to the early stages of electrification, adding: “AI coding is just the lightbulb of the machine intelligence era.”
Alibaba’s domestic rival Huawei last week also announced new AI infrastructure that can scale to up to 1 million processors.
