Alibaba Cloud has launched its newest AI chip, the Zhenwu M890, for training and inference tasks.

relax this news is still fresh..it hasnt hit the mainstream news yet

yes AliCloud is holding an event now..expecting more new releases today

Eh, depends on the price. 800GB/s memory bandwidth (what determines how fast LLMs can generate a response) is what an Apple Mac Studio with M3 Ultra chip has. This is 7 times slower than AMD's Instinct accelerator chips.

But, they're bought by the pallet, and the chips clustered together can be quite powerful--enough to run a multinational's token generation needs for an agentic inference platform, e.g. 5 trillion tokens a year. And yes, unfortunately large enterprises actually budget by a goal for decode tokens per year (it's a stupid metric).

So for the right price, this can be a good thing from Alibaba's T-Head arm that makes chips.

It's a real foot in the door as companies shift to GPU-based computing to replace headcount. Combined with closed-source Qwen models, it's a compelling offer; enterprises are looking for a one-stop shop. It's what makes Microsoft's GitHub Copilot so wildly successful in the US.

And just an aside: Qwen 3.6 is fantastic. I host the dense and mixture of experts models and they actually cut down on token use because they get it right the first time or two without needing much re-prompting.

Yes and No.