Alibaba appears to be emulating NVIDIA's well-established vertical integration playbook by bringing day-zero support for its highly capable Qwen-3.8 27B AI model - one that can run on just 32GB of VRAM - to its bespoke RISC-V chip, called XuanTie C950.

Alibaba unveiled the XuanTie C950 in March 2026, marketing the chip as a RISC-V-based offering for edge AI. Unlike typical ASICs, the XuanTie C



