Alibaba and Qualcomm unveil new chips on the same day

At Apsara Conference, Alibaba’s T-Head unveiled the Zhenwu V900 AI training/inference processor — 216 GB memory, 1,200 GB/s inter-chip bandwidth, 3× its May Zhenwu M890 predecessor, FP8/FP4 native, mass production targeted for Q1 2027 — plus a supernode path of up to 500,000 cards, while Alibaba said Qwen 4 is in training and sketched Qwen 4.5 / Qwen 5 toward 5–10 trillion parameters and a 2032 Alibaba Cloud capacity goal above 20 GW (alibabacloud.com press release). The same day at Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm launched twin flagship SoCs, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, pitched for on-device agentic AI; Extreme is framed to run 30B+ MoE models locally on a 2 nm process with first-class 5 GHz mobile CPU claims, with devices from Xiaomi, Motorola, and other OEMs queued (Qualcomm Summit release via TechCrunch / company highlights; direct Qualcomm fetch timed out).

Earlier coverage

Frontier standards talks; Bessent–He AI incident-notification proposal; SoftBank senior notes for OpenAI; FAA SMART; Newsom data-center bills.

— Lark Pemberton