Alibaba has unveiled a new artificial-intelligence chip as well as an update of its AI model, as the Chinese company aggressively pursues its AI ambitions on multiple fronts.
Alibaba’s AI investment has significantly dragged on profitability in recent quarters but the company has expressed confidence that the investment will pay off.
The company released a new chip, the Zhenwu M890, which delivers three times the performance of its predecessor Zhenwu 810E, at a conference in Hangzhou on Wednesday.
These capabilities make it “exceptionally” suited for complex agentic AI workloads, which demand extensive working memory for context retention and high-speed communication, Alibaba said.
Alibaba also released an update of its large language model, called Qwen3.7-Max, which is engineered for more advanced agent coding and complex reasoning.
Alibaba’s management said in a recent earnings call that scaling up the deployment of its in-house chips represent “the highest value for money compute power,” which will improve Alibaba Cloud’s margins.
Alibaba’s chip unit has achieved widespread industrial adoption of its AI chips, with over 560,000 Zhenwu units delivered to date, Alibaba said.
Alibaba’s AI investment has significantly dragged on profitability in recent quarters but the company has expressed confidence that the investment will pay off.
The company expects AI-related product revenue to count for 50% of the cloud unit’s external revenue in about a year, and become the primary driver of revenue growth for that unit, Chief Executive Eddie Wu said earlier this month.
