2 entries tagged alibaba. All writing.
TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 The Chip China Banned Itself Into Building On September 22, Alibaba's chip unit T-Head unveiled the Zhenwu V900 at the company's Apsara Conference in Hangzhou — 216GB of on-package memory, a 1,200GB/s interconnect, and clusters scaling to 500,000 units, which CEO Eddie Wu called "the most powerful AI chip in China today." The obvious story is the timing, one day before Xi Jinping landed in Washington for his first US state visit in three years. The more interesting story is who actually kept Nvidia's H200 out of China — and it wasn't only Washington. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 21, 2026 The Most-Downloaded AI Models in the World Are Alibaba's On 18 September Alibaba's Qwen team shipped Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash — one model that takes text, images, audio and video, holds a million tokens of context, and decides for itself which parts of a two-hour video are worth watching. The release is the news, but the program behind it is the story: Qwen passed three billion downloads this summer, more than Google's and Meta's open models combined. Here is what "omnimodal" actually means, what the 26 percent is measuring, and why a company most people know for e-commerce is a serious AI lab.