Alibaba plans 5-10 trillion parameter AI model, unveils new chip

Alibaba plans 5-10 trillion parameter model New Zhenwu V900 AI chip unveiled Data centre capacity targeting 20GW (Add more details from the CEO's speech from paragraph 2 onwards) BEIJING, Sept 22 (Reuters) — Alibaba Group plans to train a new artificial intelligence model with between 5 trillion and 10 trillion parameters, Chief Executive Eddie Wu said on Tuesday, as the Chinese technology giant outlined a sweeping strategy encompassing AI models, chips and data centres.

Speaking at Alibaba Cloud's annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, Wu said the company's Qwen team was continuing research into model architecture and data optimisation, with the goal of completing "more complex, longer-horizon tasks" and advancing toward artificial superintelligence, or ASI. Parameters are the variables a model learns during training and are a rough gauge of its size. 4 trillion parameters, meaning the planned model would be roughly two to four times larger. Wu said Alibaba's proprietary M890 AI supernode already handles inference for models above 2 trillion parameters, a capability he said only "a handful of companies globally" possess.

The Qwen team has made "meaningful progress" on recursive self-improvement, in which models identify their own limitations, design experiments and synthesise data to drive a cycle of self-evolution, he said. Alibaba also introduced the Zhenwu V900, a next-generation AI chip from its T-Head semiconductor unit, which Wu called the most powerful AI chip in China. It delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, the M890, and a single cluster built on it can support up to 500,000 cards for frontier model training and inference, he said. The company expects "significant growth" in annual AI chip shipments, Wu said.

S. export restrictions. Wu set a target for Alibaba Cloud's global data centre capacity to surpass 20 gigawatts by 2032. He said customer demand for AI remained "exceptionally robust" and was accelerating Alibaba Cloud's revenue growth, but acknowledged that global shortages across the AI data centre supply chain were limiting how fast the company could expand.

"The industry's mid-to-long-term demand far outpaces our supply capabilities," he said, adding that Alibaba Cloud would begin bringing its AI supernodes online at commercial scale this quarter. Wu framed the moment as the dawn of an era of "Machine Intelligence" comparable to the Industrial Revolution, predicting machines would eventually produce more than 1,000 times the "thinking" of all humanity, up from less than 3% today. He likened AI coding to the light bulb of the electrical age — an early application rather than the breakthrough product. "The truly groundbreaking products of the Machine Intelligence era have not yet arrived," he said.

com;)