Chinese technology giant Alibaba on 24th March unveiled its next-generation XuanTie C950 5-nanometer chip at its internal conference, the company said in its blog post, as it prepares to take the next leap towards the development of agentic AI.

Chinese technology giant Alibaba has developed a 3.2 GHz server chip using the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture. It is being touted as “the highest-performing RISC-V CPU in the world.” It is worth noting here that the company has yet to disclose the semiconductor manufacturer it used to fabricate this chip.

This new chip is said to offer the company more than three times the performance of its previous chip, the XuanTie C920. It is indeed a big leap for Alibaba as it is moving further into high-performance computing and chip design for the development of AI.

Alibaba has highlighted how one of the key advantages of RISC-V is its openness as a standard architecture, which enables designers to implement their own instruction sets and optimize these chips for certain types of artificial intelligence workloads without having to pay high royalties. The company has emphasised how this is particularly important in the context of developing AI agents, as certain types of acceleration can make a significant difference.

Alibaba is stepping up its internal chip initiatives through its T-Head chip division. At present, Alibaba’s chip initiatives can be divided into two main areas: one is the Zhenwu 810E series, which is targeted towards AI training and inference, and the other is the XuanTie series, which is targeted towards high-end cloud computing and agentic AI applications.

This chip announcement comes shortly after the announcement by Alibaba of the Wukong platform, which is designed for the workflow of AI agent-based applications, as businesses and institutions throughout China increasingly turn to OpenClaw. Monday also saw the announcement by Alibaba of the international version of this platform, dubbed Accio Work, which the company claims is capable of running complex business operations autonomously for small and medium-sized businesses.

This month, Alibaba also reorganised several of its groups focused on the development and deployment of AI technology into a new division dubbed Alibaba Token Hub. This new division is focused on the creation of AI work platforms for enterprises.

The decision is a part of a broader shift in the company’s business strategy as Alibaba attempts to find new ways of staying profitable. With the prices of tokens for Chinese artificial intelligence models plummeting due to stiff competition in the Chinese market, Alibaba is shifting focus to integrated AI systems, agentic systems, and the development of chips.