Alibaba announced plans to expand its global datacenter fleet to 20GW of capacity and revealed the Zhenwu V900 chip to power these facilities. CEO Eddie Wu presented the ambitions at Alibaba's Apsara conference, positioning AI as the next transformative technology that will eventually handle 99.9% of global cognition work. The expansion demonstrates Alibaba's confidence in the continued growth of AI demand, though the company appears to be moving at a more measured pace than major rivals.

In context, the USA alone has 37.7GW of datacentres currently under construction, including 10GW for OpenAI's Stargate project by 2029 and Meta's 5GW campus. Alibaba's new Zhenwu V900 chip offers three times the performance of its predecessor and can support clusters of up to half a million units, featuring 216GB of memory and 1200GB/s inter-chip bandwidth. The company is also training its next-generation Qwen 4 model, with successors planned that will scale to five and ten trillion parameters, though production timelines for the chip remain unconfirmed.