Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
At a conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba stated it has already shipped 560,000 Zhenwu units to over 400 customers across 20 industries. This new chip could potentially enhance Alibaba and its chip subsidiary T-Head's competitiveness in China's burgeoning domestic AI processor market, which includes rivals such as Huawei and Cambricon.
Alibaba also announced on Wednesday that it will soon launch its next-generation AI model, Qwen3.7-Max.
Alibaba Challenges Nvidia In China
Alibaba's chip unit, T-Head, unveiled the Zhenwu 810E in January, designed for training and inference workloads, with performance comparable to Nvidia's China-focused H20 GPU. Reports also indicated that the Chinese tech giant also plans to spin off its chip unit, T-Head, into a standalone company with partial employee ownership to capitalize on growing demand for agentic AI.
Alibaba's AI models and applications are expected to generate 30 billion yuan ($4.42 billion) in recurring revenue by year-end, contributing significantly to the company's cloud-computing revenue. The company's increased investment in AI infrastructure and cloud services is a response to rising demand.
Meanwhile, even as the U.S. has approved limited sales of Nvidia's H200 chips to Chinese tech giants, the Jensen Huang-led company's return to the Chinese market comes at a challenging time. Alibaba, Tencent Holding Ltd.
That being said, SemiAnalysis analyst Myron Xie told CNBC that Alibaba's latest chip still trails leading Western rivals in memory capacity and bandwidth, with key compute performance metrics yet to be disclosed.
