Alibaba Cloud plans six-year stroll to 20GW of datacenters, reveals chip to power them

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 really important stuff came along decades later.

He also compared AI to steam engines.

“Steam and combustion engines were designed merely to do what horses and laborers were already doing: pumping water, weaving, and hauling,” he said.

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.

“In the future, every niche domain will have millions of AI scientists and domain experts constantly driving breakthroughs and tackling challenges,” he said, before asking his audience to imagine an AI charged with building a starship capable of reaching Mars.

“For such an ultra-complex, long-horizon task, AI will break it down into tens of millions of subtasks, executed by millions of agents working non-stop until completion,” he said.

“A human only needs to define the intent and the goal to mobilize massive intellectual resources.” Going large 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 currently under construction in the USA alone.

Some of that will go to the Stargate project, which has promised to bring 10GW online by 2029.

OpenAI is a member of Stargate and has promised to implement 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.

We could go on but you probably get the idea: Alibaba Cloud is going to build a lot of infrastructure, but perhaps more slowly than its rivals – and may still end up with a relatively modest datacenter fleet.