Alibaba unveils proprietary AI chips and its Qwen 4 roadmap

At Apsara Conference, Alibaba Cloud announced high-performance proprietary AI chips, a purpose-built agentic cloud and a mobile AI-agent platform. Qwen 4 is in training, while Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 are projected to scale to 5-10 trillion parameters. Alibaba also says Qwen3.8-Max improved through 33 autonomous iterations and made more than 10,000 EDA calls in a chip-design experiment, reducing area 42% with no performance loss. These are company-reported results awaiting independent benchmarks and customer deployment evidence.