Alibaba shares rose about 3 per cent in Hong Kong on Tuesday after the Chinese technology giant unveiled a new artificial intelligence chip and announced plans to significantly expand its global data centre capacity as it intensifies its investment in AI infrastructure.
The company made the announcements at the annual Apsara Conference hosted by its cloud computing unit in Hangzhou, where it introduced the Zhenwu V900, its next-generation AI chip.
Alibaba said the V900 delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890, which was released in May.
The company also announced plans to increase Alibaba Cloud’s global data centre capacity to more than 20 gigawatts by 2032, as part of a broader strategy covering AI chips, cloud infrastructure and AI models.
The move comes as technology companies globally accelerate investments in computing infrastructure to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence services.
Earlier this month, Nvidia outlined plans to work with Australian partners to support up to two gigawatts of AI infrastructure in Australia by 2027. Meta also announced in July plans to build its first data centre in Canada, a one-gigawatt facility in Alberta expected to cost about $9 billion and take up to three years to complete.
Alibaba said the new Zhenwu AI chip is scheduled for mass production and commercial release in the first quarter of 2027. Its existing Zhenwu chips are already being used by more than 650 customers across sectors including automotive, finance, energy and manufacturing.
The company also disclosed that its next-generation Qwen 4 model is currently in training, while outlining plans for future Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 model series.
Alibaba Group Chief Executive Officer, Eddie Wu, said machine thinking still had an “enormous growth runway,” likening the current stage of AI development to the early days of electrification.
“AI coding is simply the light bulb of the machine intelligence era,” Wu said.
The latest developments come shortly after Alibaba’s domestic rival, Huawei, unveiled new AI infrastructure that it said can scale to as many as one million processors.
Boluwatife Enome
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