Alibaba Group shares jumped roughly 3% in Hong Kong on Tuesday, with some reports citing gains above 5%, after the company unveiled its next-generation Zhenwu V900 AI chip and outlined aggressive data center expansion plans at the annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou.
The new processor, developed by Alibaba’s T-Head semiconductor unit, is claimed to deliver three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890 released in May. The V900 can be clustered in groups of up to 500,000 units for frontier-model training, and mass production and commercial availability are scheduled for the first quarter of 2027. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said Alibaba Cloud is targeting 20 gigawatts of global data center capacity by 2032, citing “exponentially rising demand for AI.” The company has committed more than $53 billion over three years to AI expansion, supported in part by a roughly $10.2 billion Hong Kong stock offering in August.
Alibaba also said its next-generation Qwen 4 model is currently in training, with Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 already planned. The company intends to develop a model with between 5 trillion and 10 trillion parameters, far larger than most current systems, and plans to list its T-Head chip design unit separately. Wu compared today’s AI development to the early stages of electrification, while Chairman Joe Tsai said AI can be deployed and scaled across real-world industries to boost productivity.
The announcements come amid intensifying competition. Huawei recently unveiled AI infrastructure that can scale to as many as one million processors, Nvidia outlined plans for up to 2 gigawatts of AI infrastructure in Australia by 2027, and Meta announced a 1-gigawatt data center project in Alberta expected to cost around $9 billion. The Alibaba news also arrived as US officials accused Alibaba and DeepSeek of improperly obtaining knowledge from leading US AI models; the FBI, NSA, and CISA said Chinese tech firms mined systems including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok. China dismissed the claims. The conference took place ahead of a planned meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on September 24, with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella expected at a White House state dinner.
