THE CRUNCH
Alibaba has unveiled the Zhenwu V900 AI accelerator, claiming it is the most powerful chip in China. The device boasts 216 GB of memory and can scale to a supernode of 500,000 cards. It is slated for mass production in the first quarter of 2027 and will be used to train future Qwen models with up to 10 trillion parameters.
The chip offers 1,200 GB/s of inter-chip bandwidth, a significant jump from the previous M890 model, and can support more than 1,000 chips in a single system. Alibaba has already shipped over 650,000 Zhenwu chips to external customers. The company aims to reach a data centre capacity of more than 20 gigawatts by 2032, though global supply chain shortages are currently limiting its growth.
While Alibaba claims the V900 is three times faster than the M890, the technical specifications do not include FLOPS, process node, power figures, or memory bandwidth claims. Huawei’s Ascend 960PR, due in the third quarter of 2027, is slated for 192GB of memory capacity and 2.4TB/s of memory bandwidth. Alibaba’s ambitious timeline has moved up from the third quarter of 2027 to the first quarter of 2027.