Alibaba releases AI chip for training, inference

Alibaba unveiled the Zhenwu M890 AI accelerator in Hangzhou, China, on May 20, adding a chip for training and inference as it expands its AI stack.

The chip, made by Alibaba’s chip unit T-Head, has 144GB of GPU memory and will also be offered in a Panjiu AL128 Supernode Server that links 128 accelerators in one rack.

The company said it plans annual Zhenwu upgrades.

Alibaba also released the Qwen 3.7-Max model for coding and agent-based tasks.

It said T-Head has shipped 560,000 Zhenwu chips to more than 400 external customers, including China Unicom, as the company explores a listing for the chip design business.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Alibaba chip push gained public attention before the Zhenwu M890 launch

The Zhenwu M890 arrived after public attention on Alibaba’s chip work, including a China Central Television (CCTV) segment on its semiconductor design efforts 1.
In September 2025, CCTV featured a T-Head-built “PPU” accelerator and said it was “on par” with Nvidia’s H20, which was built to meet U.S. export controls 2.
The segment aired during Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s visit to China Unicom’s Sanjiangyuan Green Energy Intelligent Computing Centre in Qinghai province, giving domestic chip projects high-level visibility 2.
The PPU card on CCTV was listed with 96GB of high-bandwidth memory and 400 watts of power use. Alibaba says the Zhenwu M890 has 144GB of GPU memory, though these sources do not prove it is a generational step beyond that larger memory figure 2.

T-Head may become a separate business before any IPO

Alibaba is weighing a plan to turn T-Head into a separate company with partial employee ownership before any initial public offering (IPO), though the timing is still unclear 3.
Baidu’s chip subsidiary Kunlunxin (Beijing) Technology also confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO earlier this month, part of a wider push by Chinese tech firms 3.
An IPO could let T-Head, founded in 2018 and fully owned by Alibaba, raise money outside the parent company. The process is still at an early stage 4.
Jefferies, an investment bank, called T-Head part of Alibaba’s full-stack cloud infrastructure with deep ties to its AI systems. The cited source does not call it a separate “vertically integrated” ecosystem 3.