USA alone has 37GW under construction, but Alibaba doesn't think the AI boom will run out of steam.
Chinese tech giant Alibaba has outlined an ambition to expand its datacenter fleet to 20GW of capacity, and chip that will help it get there.
CEO Eddie Wu announced those ambitions today at Alibaba’s Apsara conference, where he delivered a speech that likened current AI applications to light bulbs, because electric light was an early application of electricity but the stuff came along decades later.
Over time, the CEO said, engines proliferated to the point at which “machine power already drives 99.9% of the world’s physical work.”
The CEO thinks AI – which he prefers to call “Machine Thinking” – will one day do 99.9% of all cognition, and usher in various utopian outcomes.
Alibaba Cloud, he said, has decided to play its part by mobilizing resources to scale its global datacenter fleet to 20GW.
By way of comparison, commercial real estate outfit Cushman and Wakefield last week said it can see 37.7GW of datacenters now under construction in the USA alone. OpenAI is a member of Stargate and has promised to carry out 10GW of Broadcom accelerators by 2029. Meta has announced plans to build a 5GW datacenter campus for its own use.
In late 2025, Amazon said it added 3.8GW of capacity in the previous twelve months.
The chip comes from Alibaba’s T-Head semiconductor business, which has published basic specs describing the processor as possessing 216GB of memory and 1200 GB/s inter-chip interconnect bandwidth.