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.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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