On May 20, 2026, during the Alibaba Cloud Summit, Pingtouge — Alibaba’s chip division — officially unveiled its latest AI chip, Zhenwu M890, which integrates both training and inference capabilities. Alongside it, the company also launched its self-developed interconnect chip, ICN Switch 1.0. The Zhenwu M890 features 144GB of HBM memory and boasts an inter-chip bandwidth of 800GB/s; its overall performance is three times higher than that of its predecessor, the Zhenwu 810E. It natively supports precision levels ranging from FP32 down to FP4, making it suitable for diverse scenarios — from high-precision training to ultra-low-precision inference. Meanwhile, ICN Switch 1.0 utilizes Pingtouge’s proprietary ICN bus protocol and PCCL communication library; it delivers a throughput of 25.6 Tbps and maintains P2P latency under 150 nanoseconds, thereby enabling full-bandwidth interconnection among up to 64 Zhenwu M890 chips. Alibaba Cloud also introduced the Panjiu AL128 hyperscale node server, which integrates 128 tightly coupled Zhenwu M890 chips per rack; logically functioning as a single computer, this system can run large models with trillions of parameters on a single node. Currently available via Alibaba Cloud’s Bailian platform, it supports major models such as Qwen, DeepSeek, and Kimi.
Gao Hui, Vice President of Pingtouge Semiconductor, revealed that as of April this year, cumulative shipments of Zhenwu-series chips have reached 560,000 units, serving over 400 clients across more than 20 industries including telecommunications, automotive, and banking. The summit also unveiled a two-year roadmap for the Zhenwu series: the Zhenwu V900 is slated for release in Q3 2027, delivering another threefold performance boost, while the Zhenwu J900 is set to follow in Q3 2028 — thus maintaining a steady annual iteration cycle. For context, the previous-generation Zhenwu 810E debuted in January 2026 featuring 96GB of HBM2e memory; its overall performance closely matches that of NVIDIA’s H20 chip. Liu Weiguang, President of Alibaba Cloud’s Public Business Division, stated: „Entering the era of agents, Alibaba Cloud now offers a fully integrated stack spanning underlying chips, models, cloud infrastructure, and applications.“
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