Alibaba unveils Zhenwu V900 AI chip and 20GW data center plan

Alibaba Group unveiled the Zhenwu V900 artificial intelligence chip at its Apsara Conference in Hangzhou on September 22, 2026, with Chief Executive Eddie Wu calling it the most powerful AI chip in China today. Wu said the Zhenwu V900 delivers three times the performance of the Zhenwu M890, the company's previous generation chip released in May. The chip was designed by THead, Alibaba's semiconductor unit, and carries 216GB of memory and 1,200GB/s of chip-to-chip bandwidth. It natively supports FP8 and FP4 low-precision number formats used for AI inference. Alibaba said the chip can be configured in supernode clusters of up to 500,000 units to train and run frontier AI models. Mass production and commercial release are scheduled for the first quarter of 2027. Alibaba did not publish the benchmarks behind the threefold performance figure, nor did it disclose who will manufacture the V900 or on which process node, details that matter given U.S. export controls restricting Chinese companies' access to advanced chips and chipmaking tools.