Alibaba unveils Zhenwu M890 chip and Qwen 3.7Max at Cloud Summit

Alibaba Group has unveiled a new artificial intelligence chip and an upgraded large language model, marking a significant step in its strategy to build a comprehensive, domestic AI infrastructure. The announcements were made at the Alibaba Cloud Summit in Hangzhou.

The new chip, the Zhenwu M890, is designed by Alibaba's semiconductor subsidiary, THead. The company states the processor delivers three times the computational performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu 810E. Key specifications include 144 GB of HBM3 memory and an inter-chip bandwidth of 800 GB per second. Unlike the previous generation, the M890 is designed to support both AI model training and inference tasks, making it a more versatile solution for developing and deploying AI applications. It is specifically engineered for "agentic AI" workloads, which involve autonomous systems executing complex, sequential tasks.

Alongside the chip, Alibaba introduced the Panjiu AL128 Supernode Server, a system architecture that integrates 128 of the new accelerators within a single rack to deliver high-density computing for large-scale AI training clusters.

The company also launched an upgraded version of its flagship large...