Alibaba Cloud's CTO reportedly said from the stage of the Apsara conference that Qwen4, the next generation of the group's language models, will launch next week. The indication comes from an attendee, cited in a discussion on the r/LocalLLaMA community, and is not yet confirmed by an official announcement.
What is known so far about the Qwen4 family
The Qwen4 name is not new. Già a settembre Alibaba aveva ufficializzato la linea Qwen4 al Yunqi Conference, con Max, Flash, Plus e un modello da 27B. At the Apsara conference in Hangzhou on September 22, 2026, Alibaba had already said that Qwen 4 was in training, alongside the Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 families, projected to reach 5 to 10 trillion parameters. The same month the group also presented an open-weight model of 27 billion parameters, named Qwen 4 27B, without disclosing specifications, license or release date. The local community is focused on this model, after seeing the earlier Qwen3.8-27B run on a single 17 GB VRAM GPU.
Image: Qwen — https://chat.qwen.ai/
The roadmap therefore remains partly unclear: the launch reported for next week may refer to the first Qwen4 version or to one of the family's models, and the available sources do not specify which.
The infrastructure context
The same conference highlighted the group's hardware investment. Alibaba presented the Zhenwu V900, an accelerator made by T-Head with 216 GB of GPU memory, which can operate in clusters of up to 500,000 units. The group aims to exceed 20 gigawatts of datacenter capacity by 2032, a target CEO Eddie Wu admitted has been slowed by global shortages in the AI chip supply chain.
What to expect
If the launch does arrive in the reported week, the first check will be the availability of the weights: Alibaba has already published open models in the Qwen3.8 series, including the 27B and the 2.4-trillion-parameter Max, and the community is waiting to see whether Qwen4 will follow the same strategy. Until then, the date is the one relayed by a conference attendee.
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