Alibaba unveils what it calls China’s most powerful chip and ambitious AI model plans

HONG KONG — China’s Alibaba unveiled new artificial intelligence chip technologies and plans for more powerful models on Tuesday, including what it said was China’s most powerful AI chip, days ahead of a meeting between Chinese and U.S. leaders at which competition to lead on AI technology is expected to be a major theme.

Alibaba’s announcement came as U.S. AI leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, are warning that China’s development of AI poses a threat to the United States and calling for an overall slowdown on development of the technology.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is set to arrive in Washington on Wednesday for a state visit and meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, at which AI, trade and tariffs are expected to be discussed.

At its annual flagship conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba rolled out a new AI chip and described its plans for the next generation of its AI model.

CEO Eddie Wu said the new Zhenwu V900 chip is the “most powerful AI chip in China today” and can deliver three times the performance of the company’s previous generation Zhenwu M890 chip.

Such chips power frontier AI model training and “inference,” a term for the calculations a trained…

Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/business