Chinese tech giant Alibaba has set a goal to grow its datacenter infrastructure to 20 gigawatts of capacity and introduced a new processor to help achieve that target, according to announcements made at the company's Apsara conference. CEO Eddie Wu outlined the expansion plans alongside the launch of the Zhenwu V900, which the company describes as China's most powerful AI chip. The moves come as Alibaba positions itself for what Wu believes will be an era when artificial intelligence handles virtually all human cognition.
The scale of Alibaba's ambitions, however, appears modest compared to competitors in the United States. Commercial real estate firm Cushman and Wakefield recently reported that the U.S. alone has 37.7GW of datacenters currently being built. The Stargate project has committed to bringing 10GW online by 2029, while Meta plans a 5GW datacenter campus for its own operations. Amazon added 3.8GW of capacity in the twelve months prior to late 2025. The company later revealed it will open new cloud regions in Turkey, Finland, and the Netherlands within a year, and expand its datacenter presence in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France, and Hong Kong.
The Zhenwu V900 chip delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890, according to Wu's keynote remarks. Alibaba's T-Head semiconductor division developed the processor, which features 216GB of memory and 1200 GB/s interconnect bandwidth between chips. The company says it can construct a single cluster containing up to half a million V900 processors, creating systems capable of training and running advanced AI models. Wu also announced that Alibaba has begun training Qwen 4, its next-generation model, with two additional successors planned that will scale to five trillion and ten trillion parameters respectively.
Wu positioned AI—which he prefers calling "Machine Thinking"—as comparable to electricity and steam engines in historical significance. He noted that steam and combustion engines initially "were designed merely to do what horses and laborers were already doing," but eventually reached the point where machine power drives 99.9% of physical work globally. The CEO predicts AI will similarly handle 99.9% of all cognitive tasks, enabling "millions of AI scientists and domain experts" in every specialized field to drive breakthroughs continuously. The company is exploring Recursive Self-Improvement technology, which allows models to design new models, and Wu said Alibaba's Qwen team has made meaningful progress in this area. While Wu didn't specify construction locations, China's government is encouraging massive datacenter builds in the country's western regions where renewable energy is abundant and inexpensive—a likely destination for much of Alibaba's planned infrastructure.
For cloud providers, betting on slower but steadier expansion may prove strategically sound if regulatory headwinds or energy constraints force competitors to scale back their more aggressive timelines. Chinese tech firms face particular scrutiny in Western markets, which could shape not just where Alibaba builds but whether its global ambitions can match its domestic dominance.