Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) pledged to invest more than 380 billion yuan (US$52.4 billion) in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure such as data centers over the next three years, a major commitment that underscores the e-commerce pioneer’s ambitions of becoming a leader in AI.
The Internet company co-founded by Jack Ma (馬雲) plans to spend more on its AI and cloud computing network than it has over the past decade.
Alibaba envisions becoming a key partner to companies developing and applying AI to the real world as models evolve and need increasing amounts of computing power, the company said on its official blog.
Photo: AFP
That target is one of China’s biggest AI infrastructure budgets, underscoring Alibaba’s growing ambitions in the field. It comes after Alibaba last week posted its fastest pace of revenue growth in more than a year and Ma was seen meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at a televised summit in Beijing.
However, it also comes at a time investors are pondering whether big tech firms are overestimating future demand for AI services, or the capital needed to create them.
TD Cowen Inc analysts on Friday said Microsoft Corp is canceling leases for a substantial amount of data center capacity in the US — a move that might reflect concerns about whether it is building more AI computing than it would need over the long term.
Big tech firms from Meta Platforms Inc to Amazon.com Inc are pledging billions toward the data centers needed to train, develop and host AI services.
Wall Street has begun to question whether such investment is running ahead of reality, particularly after Chinese upstart DeepSeek (深度求索) unveiled a model trained for a fraction of the cost of many of its rivals.
However, many of the industry’s biggest names — including Nvidia Corp’s Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) — continue to argue that AI would simply transform the tech landscape.
Alibaba certainly falls in that camp. The Chinese company is now righting a business knocked off-kilter by a government clampdown that began in 2020, refocusing its ambitions on e-commerce and AI.
Last week, Alibaba chief executive officer Eddie Wu (吳泳銘) said that artificial general intelligence — powerful, hypothetical AI systems that could emulate or match human thinking capabilities — was now the company’s primary objective, joining a race so far led by the likes of OpenAI and big US firms like Alphabet Inc.
While a milestone for China, Alibaba’s three-year timeline lags behind its US peers.
Microsoft for one expects to spend US$80 billion this fiscal year on AI data centers, while Meta has earmarked some US$65 billion for this year. That’s in part because Alibaba is a relatively newer entrant to the field, although it has operated an Amazon Web Services-like platform globally for years.
Chinese firms in general are also limited by US sanctions from buying the most expensive Nvidia AI chips for their data centers — a factor that curtails computing power, but also helps cap costs.
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