HANGZHOU: Alibaba unveiled new artificial intelligence chip technology and outlined plans for more powerful AI models on Tuesday, including what it called China's most powerful AI chip, days before Chinese and U.S. leaders are set to meet in a summit where competition over AI is expected to loom large.
The announcement came as prominent U.S. AI figures, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, have warned that China's progress in AI poses a threat to the United States and have called for the pace of AI development to slow overall.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is scheduled to arrive in Washington on Wednesday for a state visit and a meeting with President Donald Trump, where AI, trade and tariffs are expected to be on the agenda.
At its annual flagship technology conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba introduced a new chip and detailed plans for its next generation of AI models. CEO Eddie Wu said the new chip, called the Zhenwu V900, is "the most powerful AI chip in China today," offering three times the performance of the company's previous Zhenwu M890 chip.
Chips like these power the training of advanced AI models as well as "inference" — the calculations a trained AI system performs to generate responses for users. Alibaba's Zhenwu chips run in the company's data centers, supplying computing power to Alibaba itself and to its cloud computing clients.
The company also said it intends to train a new model with five to 10 trillion parameters, a measure of an AI system's learning capacity. Alibaba's current flagship model, Qwen3.8-Max, has 2.4 trillion parameters. Rival Chinese firm Moonshot has said its Kimi K3 model, released in July, is the largest open model in the world, with 2.8 trillion parameters.
Alibaba also laid out plans to expand the data centers underpinning its cloud business, pointing to what it described as exponentially rising demand for AI computing power. The company said it expects to control more than 20 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2032. By comparison, SpaceX had roughly 1.4 gigawatts of AI computing capacity as of mid-2026 and has said it hopes to exceed 10 gigawatts by 2027.
Some analysts say recent Chinese AI advances are strengthening Beijing's hand ahead of its talks with Washington, as China pushes for greater technological self-reliance even as U.S.-led export controls continue to block it from some of the world's most advanced chips and chipmaking equipment. Open-source Chinese AI models, often cheaper than top-tier closed models from leading U.S. labs, have also been gaining ground internationally, including in the United States.
Huawei, another Chinese technology giant, unveiled its own new chip technology last week as it works to challenge global leaders such as Nvidia.
Wu said Alibaba is "mobilizing every resource" to meet customer demand for AI, though he acknowledged that global shortages across the AI data center supply chain are currently limiting how quickly the company can scale up its computing infrastructure.
Wu also compared the growth of AI to the industrial revolution, predicting that "machine intelligence" will eventually far outpace human thinking capacity. While he said machine intelligence today is not a substitute for human intelligence, he forecast that machines will eventually be capable of producing more than 1,000 times the collective "thinking" output of humanity, up from less than 3% currently.
