One post tagged with "Alibaba"

Just five days after Huawei officially announced the Ascend 960 at HUAWEI CONNECT on September 17, Alibaba unveiled its new unified training-and-inference AI chip, Zhenwu V900, at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou on September 22 — which Alibaba calls "the most powerful Chinese self-developed AI chip in terms of compute performance to date." This article is compiled from Alibaba's official announcements and reports from Sina Tech, C114, Huanqiu.com, and other sources.

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1. Single Chip: 3x M890, 216GB + 1200GB/s​

Metric	Zhenwu V900 (this launch)	Zhenwu M890 (previous generation)
Performance	3x Zhenwu M890 (official figure; absolute value undisclosed)	FP16 600 TFLOPS (as catalogued on this site)
Memory	216 GB	144 GB (HBM3)
Chip-to-chip interconnect	1200 GB/s	—
Precision	Native FP8 / FP4 (including high-precision training)	—
Positioning	Unified training and inference (trillion-parameter-scale training + low-precision inference)	Unified training and inference
Mass production	2027 Q1, scaled deployment in Alibaba Cloud data centers	Already deployed at scale

Three takeaways:

• Memory crosses into the 200GB+ tier: 216GB puts it in the same capacity class as the Ascend 960DT (288GB self-developed HBM) and NVIDIA Rubin (288GB HBM4), leveling the capacity threshold for long-context and very large MoE models;
• 1200GB/s chip-to-chip interconnect: laying the foundation for the supernode's "memory-semantics interconnect" — the chip-level prerequisite that pairs with ICN Switch;
• Precision coverage across all scenarios: officially described as "high-precision training, low-precision and ultra-low-precision inference across all scenarios," with native FP8/FP4 support aligned with the common spec of 2026's new cards.

The absolute single-chip compute figure has not been officially disclosed; this site records it using the official relative figure of "3x M890." See the Zhenwu M890 spec page for M890 details.

2. System Level: ICN Switch + Panjiu Supernode, a 500,000-Card Single Cluster​

V900's real selling point is not the single chip but system-level collaboration:

• ICN Switch self-developed interconnect chip: once connected, the supernode gains native memory semantics and unified memory addressing, with a thousand cards interconnected at full bandwidth — over a thousand V900s can "work together like a single super chip";
• Panjiu supernode server: integrates V900 (compute) + ICN Switch (interconnect) + Panmai intelligent NIC (network) + Zhenyue SSD controller (storage), a fully self-developed compute-storage-network stack;
• 500,000-card single cluster: combined with Alibaba Cloud's next-generation intelligent computing center network architecture, a single cluster can scale up to 500,000 cards.

This mirrors Huawei's "11 key chips" approach: the unit of competition has shifted from the single chip to whole-system delivery capability — Zhenwu handles compute, Yitian handles general-purpose computing, Panmai handles networking, Zhenyue handles storage, and ICN Switch handles interconnect.

3. Business and Roadmap​

• The Zhenwu family has served over 650+ enterprise customers (as of June 2026), spanning autonomous driving, finance, large models, embodied AI, energy, and manufacturing;
• Supernodes based on the M890 are already deployed at scale, running models with over 2 trillion parameters such as Qwen3.8 and Kimi K3; Alibaba Cloud will add new serving nodes in Q4 to expand supernode supply;
• Roadmap: V900 enters mass production and sales in 2027 Q1; Zhenwu J900 is planned for release in 2027 Q3;
• CPU synergy: Yitian 720 / 730 arrive in 2027 (the 730 is the first to adopt T-Head's fully self-developed CPU microarchitecture, with single-core SPECint2017/GHz up to 1.4x that of Yitian 710); the 2029 Yitian 750 will interconnect directly with Zhenwu AI chips via the ICN bus;
• Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu said T-Head's AI chip annual shipment volume will increase substantially.

4. Competitive Coordinates: Two Swords in One Week​

Viewing the two mid-September launches side by side, the landscape of "system-level competition" among domestic AI chips is now clear:

Dimension	Huawei Ascend 960 (9-17)	Alibaba Zhenwu V900 (9-22)
Launch event	HC2026	Apsara Conference 2026
Per-card memory	288GB (self-developed HBM)	216GB
Memory bandwidth	9.6 TB/s	Undisclosed
Interconnect	LinJu UnifiedBus / NPO optical interconnect	ICN Switch memory-semantics interconnect
Supernode	Ascend 960 supernode (4,096 cards, 8 EFLOPS FP8)	Panjiu supernode (500,000-card single cluster)
Availability	2027 Q2	2027 Q1

Huawei is taking the "supernode + open-source CANN ecosystem" route, while Alibaba is taking the "full cloud stack + open-source model ecosystem" route; both still trail in per-card specs, but what they deliver are procurable, operable ultra-large-scale clusters. The substitution logic against NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem is shifting from "performance parity" to "supply certainty + system efficiency."

5. Summary​

• V900: 3x M890, 216GB, 1200GB/s chip-to-chip interconnect, native FP8/FP4, mass production in 2027 Q1;
• System: ICN Switch with thousand-card full bandwidth, Panjiu supernode with a fully self-developed compute-storage-network stack, 500,000-card single cluster;
• Cadence: J900 in 2027 Q3, Yitian 730 in 2027, Yitian 750 in 2029 — T-Head's first three-year generational roadmap;
• What to watch: actual mass production and Alibaba Cloud deployment scale in 2027 Q1, disclosure of V900's absolute compute, and the possibility of external supply of ICN Switch.

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Further Reading​

• Zhenwu M890 spec page (this site)
• Ascend 960 Official Launch: FP4 Compute Doubled, World's First NPO Supernode
• Domestic Top Three in H2 2026: Localization Rate Breaks 40%, Heading Toward 60%

References​

• Huanqiu.com: T-Head launches new unified training-and-inference AI chip Zhenwu V900 (2026-09-22)
• Sina Tech / TechWeb: Alibaba T-Head launches new AI chip Zhenwu V900, mass production in the first quarter of 2027
• C114: Alibaba launches new AI chip Zhenwu V900, mass production in 2027 Q1

This article is compiled from Alibaba's official announcements and public reports. The absolute single-chip compute of V900 has not been officially disclosed; supernode and cluster scale figures are official claims, subject to actual future delivery.