An Alibaba emblem is displayed on the firm’s sales space at China Worldwide Truthful for Commerce in Providers (CIFTIS) in Beijing, China, Sept. 10, 2025.
Maxim Shemetov | Reuters
CHONGQING, China — Alibaba on Wednesday introduced a brand new synthetic intelligence chip that’s 3 times extra highly effective than its predecessor, including to China’s home AI chip choices as Nvidia struggles to get its merchandise into the nation.
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 large 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 opponents 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 deal with AI accelerators.
Nevertheless, he famous that the marketed reminiscence capability and bandwidth figures are nonetheless lagging behind these of main Western chip firms. Alibaba has but to launch different vital metrics equivalent to compute efficiency, Xie added.
Chinese language AI builders have lengthy been restricted from shopping for cutting-edge processors from firms equivalent to Nvidia because of American export restrictions.
Beijing has additionally tightened scrutiny on home firms’ use of international AI chips, together with Nvidia’s H200 chip, regardless of Washington just lately clearing their sale in China.
The Zhenwu will give native tech firms another choice, though questions stay over how a lot manufacturing capability Alibaba can proceed to safe at native semiconductor foundries equivalent to Semiconductor Manufacturing Worldwide Company, in keeping with Counterpoint Analysis Affiliate Director Brady Wang.
“M890 is a small however actual contribution to China’s AI self-sufficiency … On uncooked silicon energy, M890 will not be a real competitor to H200. Nevertheless it doesn’t must be. Within the China market, it’s a plausible alternative for H200,” Wang added.
Alibaba’s newest AI processor might additionally assist assist the computing calls for of its Qwen giant language fashions. The corporate is broadly thought of a “full-stack AI firm,” because of its enterprise spanning throughout {hardware}, computing, AI fashions, instruments and purposes.
Alibaba additionally revealed on Wednesday that its next-generation AI mannequin, Qwen3.7-Max, would quickly be launched.
In early April, Alibaba and China Telecom mentioned they had been launching an information heart in southern China powered by the e-commerce large’s personal chips.
— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.
