Alibaba shares jump as new AI chip, data center buildout plans unveiled

Shares of Alibaba jumped around 3% in Hong Kong on Tuesday after the Chinese technology giant unveiled a new artificial intelligence chip and plans to sharply expand its data center footprint, stepping up its bet on the infrastructure powering the AI boom. At its cloud unit's annual flagship Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba introduced the Zhenwu V900, its next-generation AI chip that it said delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890 released in May. The company also announced plans to expand Alibaba Cloud's global data center capacity to more than 20 gigawatts by 2032 as part of a broader roadmap spanning chips, cloud infrastructure and AI models. The announcements underscore Alibaba's growing push into the machinery behind the AI boom, amid a flurry of AI infrastructure investments by its Western tech peers as the race for computing power intensifies. Earlier this month, Nvidia outlined plans to work with Australian partners to support up to 2 gigawatts of AI infrastructure in the country by 2027, while Meta in July unveiled plans for its first data center in Canada, a 1-gigawatt facility in Alberta expected to cost about $9 billion and take up to three years to complete. Alibaba's new Zhenwu AI chip is scheduled for mass production and commercial release in the first quarter of 2027. Its existing Zhenwu chips are already used by more than 650 customers across industries including automotive, finance, energy and manufacturing. The company also said its next-generation Qwen 4 model is currently in training and outlined plans for future Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 model series. Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, said machine thinking still had an "enormous growth runway," comparing today's AI development with the early stages of electrification, adding "AI coding is simply the light bulb of the machine intelligence era." Alibaba's domestic peer Huawei also unveiled new AI infrastructure last week that it said can scale to as many as one million processors.