BEIJING: Tech giant Alibaba released on Wednesday a new artificial intelligence chip it said performed three times as well as its predecessor, showcasing growing domestic chipmaker prowess as US titan Nvidia struggles for access to China. Semiconductors have been at the centre of a fierce US-China race for AI supremacy, with Nvidia&#39;s most advanced chips banned from sale in China by Washington over national security concerns. Beijing has in response sought to bolster its self-reliance, pouring resources into promoting its domestic industry and reportedly barring firms from buying Nvidia chips. Alibaba said its new chip, Zhenwu M890, can deliver three times the performance of its predecessor Zhenwu 810E, which is widely believed to match the capabilities of Nvidia&#39;s H20. The H20 is a less powerful version of Nvidia&#39;s AI processing units designed specifically for export to China. A more high-end option, the H200, has been licensed to sell to China from the US side, but its access to the Chinese market appears to have stalled. Zhang Guobin, founder of Chinese specialist website <a data-fr-linked="true" href="//eetrend.com" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">eetrend.com</a>, said the timing of the Alibaba launch is &quot;extremely precise&quot;. &quot;It&#39;s during a window when the prospects of the H200 entering the Chinese market are highly uncertain and Nvidia&#39;s business in China has effectively dropped to zero,&quot; he told AFP. Nvidia boss Jensen Huang was part of a US business delegation that travelled to Beijing with President Donald Trump last week. He said he had not discussed the H200 directly but added &quot;the Chinese government has to decide how much of their local market... they want to protect&quot;. The new Zhenwu M890 chip &quot;provides a reliable option that is insulated from fluctuations in export controls, enabling domestic AI companies to formulate long-term technology roadmaps,&quot; said <a data-fr-linked="true" href="//eetrend.com" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">eetrend.com</a>&#39;s Zhang. &quot;At the very least... (it) proves that in the field of high-end AI computing power, China now has a &#39;Plan B&#39; that does not depend on Nvidia,&quot; he added. However, when it comes to performance, Nvidia still holds its lead. Even the H200 is significantly less advanced than the firm&#39;s top-range chips -- the Blackwell series and forthcoming Rubin processors. Alibaba said to date it has shipped more than 560,000 chips in its Zhenwu series, to over 400 customers, including automakers and financial institutions. The Hangzhou-based tech giant, which runs some of the country&#39;s biggest ecommerce platforms, has accelerated its pivot to AI in recent years. Its open-source Qwen AI model family is popular among developers, surpassing one billion cumulative downloads since its initial launch in 2023.

Artificial Intelligence

Alibaba unveiled a new AI chip claiming triple the performance of its predecessor, highlighting China’s growing semiconductor capabilities as Nvidia faces US export restrictions and declining access to the Chinese market amid intensifying AI competition.

Alibaba unveils new AI chip as Nvidia access remains stalled

Reuters

BEIJING: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced on Wednesday its largest ever artificial intelligence language model, the Qwen3-Max, doubling down on AI as a core business strategy. The model, Alibaba&#39;s most powerful to date, contains more than 1 trillion parameters, or variables that determine how an AI system processes information, and shows particular strength in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities, Zhou Jingren, chief technology officer at Alibaba Cloud, said at the company&#39;s annual conference. Autonomous agent capabilities mean the AI system requires fewer human prompts than a chatbot like ChatGPT, and can make decisions and take action independently towards a goal set by the human user. Alibaba cited third-party benchmarks, such as Tau2-Bench, saying the model outperformed rival products including Anthropic&#39;s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in certain metrics. Alibaba has made AI a priority alongside its traditional e-commerce operations. Earlier this year, the company announced plans to invest 380 billion yuan ($53.40 billion) in AI-related infrastructure over the next three years as competition to develop advanced AI capabilities intensifies among Chinese tech firms. During the conference, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said the company would increase spending further, though he did not specify the amount. &quot;The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our expectations, and the industry&#39;s demand for AI infrastructure has also far exceeded our expectations,&quot; Wu said. The company released the Qwen 3 model in April. Alibaba also unveiled several other AI products on Wednesday, including Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal, immersive system useful for virtual and artificial reality applications such as smart glasses and intelligent cockpits.

The Alibaba logo is seen in this illustration taken on January 29, 2025. (Reuters)

Qwen3-Max’s autonomous agent capabilities allow it to make decisions and take actions independently with fewer human prompts, setting it apart from typical chatbots.

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Alibaba unveils new AI chip as Nvidia access remains stalled

Alibaba launches new AI model with more than 1 trillion parameters

Alibaba unveils new AI chip as Nvidia access remains stalled