❯ Alibaba plans a 5- to 10-trillion-parameter model and unveils the Zhenwu V900 chip

the model roadmapAlibaba CEO Eddie Wu announced at the 2026 Apsara Conference in Hangzhou on September 22 that the company plans to train models at the 5- to 10-trillion-parameter scale. Per the conference, the next-generation Qwen 4 is in training, with the Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 series to scale into that range; Alibaba’s current flagship runs about 2.4 trillion parameters, making the planned successors two to four times larger.

the chip, same stageAlongside it came T-Head’s next-generation AI accelerator, the Zhenwu V900, which Wu called “the most powerful AI chip in China today.” Per Alibaba, the V900 delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890, and a single cluster can scale to 500,000 cards for frontier training and inference, with mass production and commercial release expected in Q1 2027. A week earlier, T-Head and Cambricon were testing CXMT’s domestic HBM3E — the two threads meet at the question of whether domestic compute can carry trillion-parameter models.

the full-stack mathThis is the first time Alibaba has laid out models, chips and data centers on one roadmap. A 10-trillion-parameter target only counts if its own chips and clusters can carry it, and the V900’s 500,000-card cluster is the answer to that premise. Chinese model developers’ compute procurement strategies will be pushed by this full-stack play: build your own, or accept training on someone else’s silicon. With mass production in 2027, the roadmap still has to run on existing compute for at least another year.

▪ SIGNALTen trillion parameters is the target for outsiders; a 500,000-card cluster is the premise that makes it real, and Alibaba bound the two together.