An Alibaba logo is seen at the company’s booth at the China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, China, September 10, 2025.
Maxim Shemetov | Reuters
CHONGQING, China – Alibaba announced on Wednesday that its new artificial intelligence chip is three times more powerful than its predecessor, as rival Nvidia struggles to bring its advanced chips to China.
The Zhenwu M890 delivers three times the performance of the current Zhenwu 810E, Alibaba said, adding that the new processor has 144GB of GPU memory and an interchip bandwidth of 800GB per second.
The e-commerce and technology giant said it has already shipped 560,000 Zhenwu units to more than 400 customers across 20 industries.
The new chip could make Alibaba and its chip subsidiary T-Head more competitive in China’s growing domestic market for AI processors, which includes rivals such as Huawei and Cambricon.
“The AI chips developed by Alibaba are gaining popularity among external customers and are becoming one of the most popular platforms among China’s domestic AI hardware chips,” said Myron Xie, an analyst at SemiAnalysis focused on AI accelerators.
However, he pointed out that advertised memory capacity and bandwidth values still lag behind those of major Western chipmakers. Alibaba has not yet released other key metrics such as computing power, Xie added.
Because of American export restrictions, Chinese AI developers have long been barred from buying cutting-edge processors from companies like Nvidia.
Beijing has also tightened controls on domestic companies’ use of foreign AI chips, including Nvidia’s H200 chip, although Washington recently approved their sale in China.
As the country ramps up efforts to build its own AI infrastructure, Alibaba’s latest AI processor reflects progress in AI chip development and could help meet the computing needs of its large-scale Qwen language models.
On Wednesday, Alibaba also announced that its next-generation AI model, Qwen3.7-Max, would be launching soon.
In early April, Alibaba and China Telecom announced they would open a data center in southern China powered by the e-commerce giant’s own chips.
—CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.
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