As China tries to become less reliant on Nvidia, Alibaba unveils a powerful new AI chip

Alibaba released a faster AI chip, which helped China’s plans to make its own semiconductors even though the US is still limiting Nvidia’s exports.

Alibaba, a Chinese tech company, released a new AI chip on Wednesday that it said was three times more powerful than the last one. This comes at a time when China still can’t get advanced processors from companies like Nvidia because of U.S. export rules.

Alibaba said that its new Zhenwu M890 chip is three times faster than the current Zhenwu 810E processor. This shows that China is working harder to build up its own AI infrastructure and depend less on foreign microchip technology.

The company says the new processor has 800 GB per second of interchip speed and 144 GB of GPU memory.

The e-commerce and cloud computing giant also said it had already sent 560,000 Zhenwu units to more than 400 customers in 20 different industries. This shows that its AI hardware platform is becoming more popular in China.

The start should make Alibaba and its semiconductor subsidiary, T-Head, stronger in China’s AI processor market, which is getting more and more competitive as companies like Huawei and Cambricon grow.

“Myron Xie, an AI accelerator expert at SemiAnalysis, said, “Alibaba-designed AI chips are making progress with outside users and are quickly becoming one of the most popular platforms for Chinese AI hardware chips.”

Xie did say, though, that the chip’s advertised memory size and bandwidth are still not as good as those of its main Western rivals.

“He also said that Alibaba hasn’t shared any other key performance indicators, such as compute performance metrics.”

For years, Chinese AI developers haven’t been able to buy cutting-edge processors from foreign companies like Nvidia because of US export rules that are meant to keep China from getting access to advanced semiconductor technology.

Also, Beijing has tightened control over how Chinese companies use foreign AI chips, such as Nvidia’s H200 processor, even though the US just recently gave its approval for sale to China.

People think that Alibaba’s newest processor is part of China’s larger plan to build an AI computing infrastructure that can run large-scale AI models, like the Qwen series of big language models made by the company.

The company also said on Wednesday that Qwen3.7-Max, its next-generation AI model, would be out soon.

Alibaba and China Telecom announced earlier in April that they were going to build a data center in southern China that would use Alibaba’s own AI chips. This was another step in the company’s plan to improve AI computing in China.