Alibaba’s Apsara conference made its strategy unusually explicit: own more of the stack—from chips and models to cloud infrastructure. The company unveiled a Zhenwu V900 AI chip with roughly triple the performance of its predecessor, aimed at large AI clusters. The next Qwen generation is planned at 5–10 trillion parameters, up to four times the parameter count of Qwen 3.8 Max, and Alibaba Cloud data-center capacity should exceed 20 gigawatts by 2032. Shares rose about 5%.