By Adam Clark

Alibaba was rising on Wednesday. The Chinese internet company is ramping up its artificial-intelligence efforts as American peers prepare a new generation of AI models.

Alibaba's American depositary receipts were up 5.7% in early trading. The company on Tuesday announced the launch of an AI data center powered by 10,000 of its Zhenwu AI chips developed by its T-Head semiconductor unit, according to multiple reports.

The data center -- which will be operated by China Telecom -- will be an important test of whether Alibaba's in-house chips can support powerful AI models for business purposes. The center is expected to scale up to 100,000 chips, according to those reports.

Alibaba and Chinese domestic rivals are looking to take advantage of the effective absence of AI chip leader Nvidia from the market amid political tensions between Beijing and Washington. Although Nvidia said recently that it has restarted manufacturing of its H200 processors for the Chinese market, it's not clear how many orders it has received.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang previously said China represents a $50 billion market for AI infrastructure, growing at 50% a year.

Alibaba is fighting on the AI software front as well as on hardware.

Last Thursday, Alibaba released Qwen3.6-Plus, the latest version of its flagship large language model series, with a focus on its ability to write computer code. It said it was competitive with the latest models from Google and Anthropic across multiple coding benchmarks.

However, the AI coding market could be about to be upended. Anthropic has offered a preview of its new AI model, called Mythos, available to about 50 companies and organizations that maintain critical infrastructure, including Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet-owned Google and the Linux Foundation.

Anthropic has said the delayed rollout of Mythos is necessary because the model is so capable of identifying and potentially exploiting vulnerabilities in software that it cannot yet be released to the public.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

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April 08, 2026 11:21 ET (15:21 GMT)

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