Chinese tech giant Alibaba has launched a new chip aimed at artificial intelligence (AI) agents and inference computing, further strengthening its semiconductor portfolio to propel the company's AI strategy.
According to Bloomberg, Sina Tech, and Wallstreetcn, Alibaba’s research division DAMO Academy unveiled the Xuantie C950 CPU based on the RISC-V architecture on the 24th. In its statement, Alibaba said this CPU is optimized for cloud computing and allows customers to customize the chip according to their specific inference requirements.
The Xuantie C950 reportedly took two years to develop, with a frequency of up to 3.2GHz. Its single-core performance has surpassed 70 points for the first time, and its overall performance is more than three times that of the previous generation Xuantie C920. In addition, the Xuantie C950 natively supports confidential computing for secure isolation and data protection, supporting all mandatory and optional extensions.
According to IT Home, the Xuantie C950 also leverages the open-source RISC-V features, comes equipped with a self-developed AI acceleration engine, and for the first time natively supports large-scale models with tens of billions of parameters such as Qwen3 and DeepSeek V3.
Alibaba is one of China's leading AI enterprises. Its chip subsidiary T-Head aims to compete within China with companies like Nvidia and Huawei. Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming said on last week’s earnings call that the company’s self-developed AI accelerators have already entered mass production.