Alibaba’s New AI Chip Adds Another Option To China’s Domestic Alternatives To Nvidia

Chinese technology giant Alibaba, on Wednesday, announced a new artificial intelligence chip, the Zhenwu M890, which is three times more powerful than its predecessor Zhenwu 810E. The product adds a new product to China's domestic AI chip options as the country tries to get around strict US export curbs. 

Alibaba said on Wednesday that the Zhenwu M890 features 144 GB GPU memory as well as interchip bandwidth of 800 GB per second. The company has already delivered 560,000 Zhenwu units to over 400 customers in 20 industries, CNBC reported.

The Hangzhou-based firm unveiled the Zhenwu M890 at its annual ⁠Alibaba Cloud Summit. It also released the Panjiu AL128 system, which packages 128 accelerators into a single rack, at the same event. The AL128 is available via ​Bailian, Alibaba Cloud's domestic model platform, to Chinese enterprise customers.

The new chip could also make Alibaba and T-Head, the company's chip subsidiary, more competitive in China's growing domestic AI processor market. It also highlights the country's efforts to produce locally developed AI chips as Washington continues to restrict the export of the most powerful US processors to Chinese customers. Beijing has also tightened scrutiny on local companies using foreign AI chips like the Nvidia H200 even after the US recently cleared their sale in China, the outlet added.

With these restrictions in place, the M890's release could help support the growing computing demand of Alibaba's Qwen large language models.

Features Of Alibaba's New Processors

The e-commerce and technology giant said its processor can handle the emerging wave of AI "agents", or software systems which can perform complex, multi-step tasks with limited human oversight, as per Reuters. The chip is able to ​handle the heavy memory and communication demands of agent workloads, where AI models need to coordinate with one another in real time and retain long stretches of context.

Alibaba also put out ​a multi-year chip roadmap, promising to follow up the new processor with another chip called the V900. The model is expected to be released ​in the third quarter of 2027 and is expected to deliver a threefold performance boost over the M890. Another chip, the J900, is planned for release in the third quarter of 2028. 

The firm also announced that the Qwen 3.7-Max, Alibaba's next-generation AI model, would be released soon. The model has been engineered ​for long-running agent tasks and advanced coding. Alibaba stated that the Qwen 3.7-Max will be able to operate continuously, ​without any performance degradation, for up to 35 hours.