Alibaba Group Holdings CEO, Eddie Wu, revealed plans for the company to increase its spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure to better compete with U.S. rivals. The announcement led to Alibaba’s stock price soaring to its highest in almost four years.
Alibaba Group’s stock price reached 25,960 ARS, but has dropped by 1.91% at the time of publication to 25,640 ARS. The firm’s shares hit an all-time high of 28,260 ARS on September 19, and have been up 36.20% in the past 30 days.
Alibaba plans to spend 380B yuan on developing AI models
Bloomberg reported that Wu told a developer conference in Hangzhou that the Chinese multinational conglomerate will see an acceleration in global investment in AI. He also revealed that Alibaba will soon add to its plan to spend more than 380 billion yuan on developing AI models and infrastructure over three years to keep up with its competitors.
The e-commerce giant revealed in February that it plans to invest around $52.44 billion in its cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years. The firm said its total investment amount exceeds its spending in AI and cloud computing over the past decade.
The Hangzhou-based firm has also seen increased growth in its AI-related products. Alibaba reported triple-growth in its AI-related products in the most recent quarter.
The tech company’s Cloud Intelligence division became the group’s fastest-growing business unit in the previous quarter. Alibaba recorded a better-than-expected 26% surge in sales, to 33.40 billion yuan ($4.67 billion). Its increased growth in the AI sector has attracted investors who have cheered these results and initiatives, sending its stock to more than double its price over the course of the year.
Wu also noted that the firm had cumulatively invested more than 100 billion yuan in AI Infrastructure and AI product research and development over the past four quarters. He acknowledged that the company’s investment in AI has started to show tangible results, and Alibaba is expecting an increasingly clear path for AI to drive its robust growth.
Alibaba unveils Qwen Series models
Alibaba raised $3.2 billion in convertible bonds earlier this month, which was expected to be the country’s largest AI infrastructure investment. The company also included fresh upgrades to its Qwen Series models, aiming to compete with DeepSeek and OpenAI.
The e-commerce giant also unveiled its new Qwen3-Max large language model and a flurry of other improvements to its suite of AI offerings. Wu highlighted that Alibaba aims to become a full-stack AI service provider, including selling AI products like model-as-a-service to suit various needs.
The company said the Qwen3-Max model is its most powerful to date, containing more than 1 trillion parameters. Chief technology officer at Alibaba Cloud, Zhou Jingren, said the variables determine how an AI system processes information, and show particular strength in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities.
The Qwen3-Max model’s autonomous agent capabilities allow the AI system to operate with fewer human prompts than a chatbot like ChatGPT. The AI model can also make decisions and take action independently towards a goal set by the human user.
The tech company cited third-party benchmarks like the Tau2-Bench. Alibaba noted that the model outperformed rival products, including DeepSeek-V3.1 and Anthropic’s Claude in certain metrics.
Alibaba also introduced the Qwen3-Omni model, a multimodal, immersive system useful for virtual and artificial reality applications such as smart glasses and intelligent cockpits. Wu stated that the speed of AI industry development and demand have far exceeded the company’s expectations.
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Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/alibaba-stock-soars-ceo-unveils-investment/
