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Alibaba unveiled a new AI chip on Wednesday, the Zhenwu M890, which delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu 810E, as the company builds out its domestic semiconductor capabilities amid U.S. export restrictions on advanced chips.
Featuring 144GB of GPU memory and interchip bandwidth of 800GB per second, the M890 was built by T-Head, Alibaba's chip design subsidiary, the company said. Among its intended uses are training and inferencing workloads, with a particular emphasis on agentic AI — a class of software capable of executing intricate, multi-step operations autonomously.
Alongside the chip, Alibaba unveiled the Panjiu AL128, a server system that packages 128 of the accelerators into a single rack. Qwen 3.7-Max, a new large language model geared toward coding and extended agentic workflows, was also introduced at the event. Alibaba noted the model sustains consistent output across sessions of as long as 35 hours.
Alibaba said the Zhenwu product line has reached a cumulative shipment total exceeding 560,000 units, with deployments spanning more than 400 enterprise clients in 20 different industries. Looking ahead, Alibaba mapped out successive generations of in-house silicon: the V900, slated for mid-2027, is projected to roughly triple the M890's performance, while a subsequent design, the J900, is scheduled to arrive in the third quarter of 2028. Alibaba also said it plans to list T-Head to tap investor demand for Chinese alternatives to Nvidia $NVDA, according to Bloomberg.
