Alibaba Shares Rise as New AI Chip and Data Center Expansion Plans Are Revealed

Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares climbed about 3% on Tuesday after the Chinese tech company introduced a new artificial intelligence chip and detailed plans to significantly grow its data center capacity.

At the annual Apsara Conference hosted by its cloud division in Hangzhou, Alibaba presented the Zhenwu V900, its next-generation AI chip, which it says offers three times the performance of the Zhenwu M890 released in May. The company also said it intends to expand Alibaba Cloud's global data center capacity to more than 20 gigawatts by 2032, part of a wider roadmap covering chips, cloud infrastructure and AI models.

The Zhenwu V900 is set for mass production and commercial release in the first quarter of 2027. Existing Zhenwu chips already serve more than 650 customers in sectors such as automotive, finance, energy and manufacturing. Alibaba added that its next-generation Qwen 4 model is in training, with Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 series planned.

Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, said machine thinking still had an "enormous growth runway," likening today's AI development to the early days of electrification and adding that "AI coding is simply the light bulb of the machine intelligence era."

The announcements come amid a wave of AI infrastructure investment by Western tech peers as competition for computing power heats up. Earlier this month, Nvidia outlined plans with Australian partners to support up to 2 gigawatts of AI infrastructure in the country by 2027, while Meta in July announced its first Canadian data center, a 1-gigawatt facility in Alberta expected to cost about $9 billion and take up to three years. Alibaba's domestic peer Huawei also unveiled new AI infrastructure last week that it said can scale to as many as one million processors.

Source: CNBC