Alibaba Group has announced ambitious plans to significantly expand its artificial intelligence capabilities, including the development of a new AI model with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters. This model, part of the Qwen series (Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5), aims to handle more complex and longer-horizon tasks, moving towards artificial superintelligence. Currently, Alibaba's flagship model, Qwen 3.8 Max, has 2.4 trillion parameters, indicating the planned model would be two to four times larger.
The Chinese tech giant also unveiled its Zhenwu V900 AI chip, developed by its T-Head semiconductor unit. This new accelerator is touted as the most powerful AI chip in China, delivering three times the performance of its predecessor, the M890. The Zhenwu V900 can be integrated into clusters of up to 500,000 units for advanced model training and inference. The M890 chip was released in May, and the Zhenwu V900 is scheduled for mass production and commercial release in the first quarter of 2027.
Alibaba's CEO Eddie Wu outlined a massive expansion for Alibaba Cloud, targeting global data center capacity to exceed 20 gigawatts by 2032. This expansion is driven by the expectation of exponentially rising demand for AI. The company is committing more than $53 billion over three years to enhance its AI capabilities. Despite a recent quarterly profit plunge of over 75% due to a nearly $10 billion spending spree, Alibaba executives project annualized revenue from AI-related products to reach $10 billion in the current quarter, with a goal to quintuple annual cloud and AI revenue to $100 billion within five years. Alibaba also aims to recoup its overall AI investment within a three-year period.
