Alibaba sets a 2027 launch for its next AI chip

Alibaba unveiled its Zhenwu V900 AI chip on September 22. The company says it will begin mass production and commercial sales in the first quarter of 2027.

Alibaba also aims to build more than 20 gigawatts of cloud data center capacity worldwide by 2032. The company says it is training Qwen4.

Alibaba supplied the performance figures and capacity target. The company did not say how many V900 chips it will deliver or what customers will pay. It also provided no independent workload test results.

AP independently reported the launch and Alibaba's claim that the chip is three times as powerful as its predecessor. Alibaba supplied that comparison, and the reports include no independent test confirming it.

Alibaba plans to combine its own chips, cloud services and models. Buyers will still need to test whether their software works and how much their workloads cost to run.

The first test is whether Alibaba meets its first-quarter release date. Shipments, cloud instances and customer benchmarks will show how much usable capacity the company delivers.

Reaching the 2032 target will take years of construction and enough power to run the data centers. The announcement does not make that electricity available to customers today.