An Alibaba emblem is displayed on the firm’s sales space at China Worldwide Honest for Commerce in Companies (CIFTIS) in Beijing, China, Sept. 10, 2025.
Maxim Shemetov | Reuters
CHONGQING, China — Alibaba introduced Wednesday its new synthetic intelligence chip is 3 times extra highly effective than its predecessor, as rival Nvidia struggles to get its superior chips into China.
The Zhenwu M890 delivers 3 times the efficiency of the present Zhenwu 810E, Alibaba mentioned, including that the brand new processor has 144 GB GPU reminiscence and interchip bandwidth of 800 GB per second.
The e-commerce and expertise big mentioned it had already delivered 560,000 Zhenwu models to greater than 400 prospects throughout 20 industries.
The brand new chip might make Alibaba and its chip subsidiary T-Head extra aggressive in China’s rising home AI processor market, which incorporates rivals like Huawei and Cambricon.
“Alibaba designed AI chips are making headway with exterior prospects and have gotten one of many extra common platforms amongst Chinese language home AI {hardware} chips,” mentioned Myron Xie, an analyst at SemiAnalysis with a give attention to AI accelerators.
Nevertheless, he famous that the marketed reminiscence capability and bandwidth figures are nonetheless lagging behind these of main Western chip corporations. Alibaba has but to launch different vital metrics reminiscent of compute efficiency, Xie added.
Chinese language AI builders have lengthy been restricted from shopping for cutting-edge processors from corporations reminiscent of Nvidia as a result of American export restrictions.
Beijing has additionally tightened scrutiny on home corporations’ use of international AI chips, together with Nvidia’s H200 chip, regardless of Washington just lately clearing their sale in China.
Because the nation steps up its push for homegrown AI infrastructure, Alibaba’s newest AI processor displays progress in AI chip growth and will assist assist the computing calls for of its Qwen giant language fashions.
On Wednesday, Alibaba had additionally revealed that its next-generation AI mannequin, Qwen3.7-Max, would quickly be launched.
In early April, Alibaba and China Telecom mentioned they have been launching a knowledge heart in southern China powered by the e-commerce big’s personal chips.
— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.
