Alibaba plans AI model with 5-10 trillion parameters, unveils Zhenwu V900 chip

Alibaba just laid out one of the most aggressive AI roadmaps in the industry. CEO Eddie Wu took the stage at the company’s annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou on September 22 to announce plans for an AI model containing 5 to 10 trillion parameters, alongside a new custom chip called the Zhenwu V900 that the company claims is China’s most powerful AI processor. To put the model size in perspective, Alibaba’s current flagship Qwen model runs on roughly 2.4 trillion parameters. The planned successor would be two to four times larger. The Zhenwu V900 and Alibaba’s full-stack ambition The Zhenwu V900 chip, developed by Alibaba’s T-Head semiconductor unit, delivers three times the processing power of its predecessor, the M890. The chip architecture supports clusters of up to 500,000 units, giving Alibaba the infrastructure backbone needed to train and deploy models at the trillion-parameter scale it’s targeting. This isn’t T-Head’s first rodeo. The semiconductor division has been on a steady cadence of releases, rolling out the Zhenwu 810E earlier in 2026 and the M890 in May. Cumulative shipments of Zhenwu chips have now reached 560,000 units, deployed across more than 400 customers in ...