HANGZHOU, Sept. 23 -- Eddie Wu did not call this a response to Washington. He didn't have to.

Standing before several thousand engineers at Alibaba's annual Apsara Conference on Monday, the company's chief executive unveiled the Zhenwu V900, the most powerful AI training chip T-Head, Alibaba's semiconductor unit, has ever built, and described a computing architecture designed to train models that do not yet exist and power data centers not yet built. The announcement was framed as a product story. The context made it something else.

Alibaba says its V900 AI accelerator delivers three times the computing performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890.

Key specifications

Memory: 216 GB per card.

Inter-chip bandwidth: 1,200 GB/s.

Scal...