Apsara 2026: Alibaba says Qwen 4 is in training, targets 5-10T-parameter Qwen 4.5/5, reports self-improvement runs and unveils Zhenwu V900 chip
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 13 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra145 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.584 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen175 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7114 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 84 days before it.
Key facts
- Qwen 4 in training; no release date, price or benchmarks given. Press reports four tier names shown on slides (Qwen 4 Max, Plus, Flash, 27B) - not confirmed in the official release
- Roadmap: Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 ‘projected to scale up to 5 to 10 trillion parameters’ (Alibaba press release)
- RSI claim: Qwen3.8-Max ran 33 iterative cycles over one month of fully automated runs (pipeline design, data validation, experiments, error diagnosis); Artificial Analysis score 40 -> 45 (company claim)
- Chip-design demo: 60+ hours of self-improvement and 10,000+ EDA tool calls produced chip bus modules with 42% less area and no performance loss (company claim)
- Zhenwu V900 AI chip: 3x the Zhenwu M890, 216 GB memory, 1,200 GB/s inter-chip bandwidth, FP8/FP4; release Q1 2027. Zhenwu chips serve 650+ customers
- Yitian 730 CPU: +40% SPECint2017/GHz vs Yitian 710
- Eddie Wu (CEO): Alibaba Cloud’s global data-center capacity to exceed 20 GW by 2032
- Also: Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate, Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Next, Qwen-Image 3.1 (later in 2026), AgentCore enterprise agent platform, Agent Context memory layer, HPN 8.0 Pro network
Show 4 more
- Hardware: Qwen Book agentic computer running Qwen Desktop OS; Qwen Glasses N1 and N1 Pro (50MP first-person camera; Pro adds eye tracking and iris-scan payment); Qwen Clip AI earbuds; QwenNote A2 note-taker (67 g, six mics, 8 m pickup, 4G, RMB 1,199, on sale Sept 22 on Tmall)
- Sept 23: fast serving tier qwen3.8-max-prime (same weights, 1.5–2x throughput; about $4/$12 per 1M tokens via international hosts, about twice the standard model)
- T-Head says Zhenwu V900 clusters can scale to 500K units (Bloomberg); Alibaba will open its first cloud regions in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands within 12 months
- Oct 13, 2026 (Bloomberg; paywalled, read through the Techmeme summary): Alibaba unveiled the Qwen Glasses N1 from about $450, with 50MP cameras; the Pro model at about $520 adds sensors and eye-tracking; it also showed Qwen Clip AI earbuds
What happened
Alibaba used its annual cloud conference to lay out a full-stack plan covering chips (Zhenwu, Yitian), networking and storage, models (Qwen 4 in training, larger successors planned) and enterprise agent platforms. The Qwen team released Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate and the Qwen-Audio-3.1 stack around the same days.
Why it matters
It is the most concrete public scale target from a Chinese lab: 5-10T-parameter models plus a 20 GW data-center target. Alibaba also joined the labs that publicly claim automated self-improvement loops on frontier models, although the 40 -> 45 Artificial Analysis gain is a company claim that has not been independently checked.
Sources
12 sources from 9 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
12 sources: 4 primary, 8 press
Primary
- Alibaba Cloud press room - Alibaba unveils roadmap on full-stack AI strategyalibabacloud.com, official
- Alizila - Alibaba Cloud’s 2026 Apsara Conference: full-stack AI roadmap (403 to our fetcher)alizila.com, official
- Alibaba Cloud blog: Alibaba unveils agentic computer, AI wearables and more at 2026 Apsara Conferencealibabacloud.com, official
- Vercel AI Gateway: Qwen 3.8 Max Primevercel.com, docs
Press
- VIR - Alibaba targets 10 trillion parameters with next-generation Qwen 4 modelvir.com.vn, press
- Pandaily - Alibaba puts Qwen4 family into training; roadmap points to 5-10T Qwen4.5 and Qwen5pandaily.com, press
- OrcaRouter - Qwen 4 Max announced at Apsara 2026: the four tiers (secondary)orcarouter.ai, press
- TechNode Global: Alibaba unveils Qwen Book agentic computer and AI wearablestechnode.global, press
- Reuters: Alibaba plans AI model with 5-10 trillion parameters, unveils new chipreuters.com, press
- Bloomberg: Alibaba unveils AI chip to drive 20GW of data centers by 2032bloomberg.com, press
- Bloomberg: Alibaba to add data centers in Europe, Middle East in AI pushbloomberg.com, press
- Bloomberg: Alibaba unveils $450 AI glasses in expanding push into gadgets (Oct 13, 2026)bloomberg.com, press
Changes
- Added the Oct 13 launch prices of Qwen Glasses N1 / N1 Pro and the Qwen Clip earbuds (Bloomberg via Techmeme summary)
- Added Apsara hardware (Qwen Book, Glasses N1, Clip, QwenNote A2) and Qwen3.8-Max Prime tier
- Added Reuters/Bloomberg links, V900 cluster scale and new cloud regions
- Filed