Alibaba unveils V900 chip in bid to challenge Nvidia

Alibaba has unveiled the Zhenwu V900, an in-house AI accelerator it says is China’s most powerful, and plans to begin mass production in the first quarter of 2027. These chips do the expensive work of training AI models and generating responses, so a faster chip—Alibaba says the V900 delivers three times the performance of May’s M890—could make Alibaba Cloud and its customers less dependent on Nvidia hardware. That claim has not been tested in independent benchmarks, and the real competitive test will be whether software developers and cloud clients adopt it at scale. Alibaba is pairing the chip with an expansion of its data centers, targeting more than 20 gigawatts of global capacity by 2032, a sign that it wants to own the chips, cloud and models together rather than merely build AI applications.