Alibaba Unveils China’s Most Powerful AI Chip In $53 Billion Gambit

Alibaba Group has unveiled the Zhenwu V900, an AI accelerator it calls China’s most powerful, marking a major escalation in its effort to challenge Nvidia and build a vertically integrated artificial-intelligence stack stretching from chips and networking to models and hyperscale data centers. Unveiled by CEO Eddie Wu at Alibaba’s Apsara Conference, the new processor from the company’s T-Head semiconductor division reportedly delivers three times the performance of the Zhenwu M890 introduced just four months ago. The V900 carries 216 GB of memory, 1,200 GB per second of inter-chip bandwidth and native support for low-precision formats including FP8 and FP4,…