Alibaba Unveils New AI Chip and Plans Qwen Model With Up to 10 Trillion Parameters

Alibaba announced plans to train a next-generation AI model with 5 to 10 trillion parameters, a scale that would far exceed its existing Qwen lineup. The announcement came from Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming, who said the company's Qwen team is developing the massive model as part of an accelerated push into frontier AI.

Alongside the model disclosure, Alibaba unveiled a new in-house AI chip that the company calls China's most powerful, designed to support the infrastructure demands of large-scale AI training and inference. The chip underpins Alibaba's ambition to operate 20 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2032, a target that signals a sweeping build-out of its AI compute base over the next six years.

The announcements position Alibaba as a central player in China's competition with the United States in advanced AI, and they come as Chinese firms have been racing to demonstrate frontier model capabilities. BABA shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange.