An Alibaba logo is displayed at the company’s booth at China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, China, Sept. 10, 2025.
Maxim Shemetov | Reuters
CHONGQING, China — Alibaba announced Wednesday its new artificial intelligence chip is three times more powerful than its predecessor, as rival Nvidia struggles to get its advanced chips into China.
The Zhenwu M890 delivers three times the performance of the current Zhenwu 810E, Alibaba said, adding that the new processor has 144 GB GPU memory and interchip bandwidth of 800 GB per second.
The e-commerce and technology giant said it had already delivered 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 AI processor market, which includes competitors like Huawei and Cambricon.
“Alibaba designed AI chips are making headway with external customers and are becoming one of the more popular platforms among Chinese domestic AI hardware chips,” said Myron Xie, an analyst at SemiAnalysis with a focus on AI accelerators.
However, he noted that the advertised memory capacity and bandwidth figures are still lagging behind those of major Western chip companies. Alibaba has yet to release other important metrics such as compute performance, Xie added.
Chinese AI developers have long been restricted from buying cutting-edge processors from companies such as Nvidia due to American export restrictions.
Beijing has also tightened scrutiny on domestic companies’ use of foreign AI chips, including Nvidia’s H200 chip, despite Washington recently clearing their sale in China.
As the country steps up its push for homegrown AI infrastructure, Alibaba’s latest AI processor reflects progress in AI chip development and could help support the computing demands of its Qwen large language models.
On Wednesday, Alibaba had also revealed that its next-generation AI model, Qwen3.7-Max, would soon be released.
In early April, Alibaba and China Telecom said they were launching 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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