China Doesn’t Need An Nvidia Killer. Here’s How To Play It

China does not need an Nvidia killer

Alibaba’s new Zhenwu V900 has invited comparisons with Nvidia. The company says the chip delivers three times the performance of its M890 predecessor and has outlined clusters containing as many as 500,000 chips.

There are no independently verified figures for the V900’s compute performance, power consumption or total cost per inference. But technical parity with Nvidia may be the wrong threshold. Alibaba needs a domestic system capable of serving Chinese AI demand at an acceptable cost, even if it requires more hardware to do so.