Alibaba Announces $52 Billion Investment In AI And Cloud Infrastructure

The Chinese giant Alibaba announced this Monday a new investment plan of 380 billion yuan—around $52.44 billion—in artificial intelligence infrastructure and cloud computing for the next three years.

According to Reuters, Alibaba had previously announced its intentions to invest more in AI but didn’t provide details of the total amount. On Friday, the company shared its most recent quarterly revenue report with a 32% revenue growth and emerging as an AI leader in the industry and the region.

The new billionaire investment hits a record as it exceeds the figures the company has invested in AI in the past 10 years, leveraging the current positive landscape in which it has stood out for its leadership, growth, and strong market projections.

A few weeks ago, Alibaba released the latest version of its flagship AI model, Qwen, claiming it could perform better than frontier models like DeepSeek-V3 or GPT-4o.

The tech giant has also developed advanced multimodal versions capable of processing images and performing advanced tasks as AI agents similar to OpenAI’s Operator.

Despite the market’s strong performance, Alibaba faces tough competition in the region from rivals like ByteDance, which recently introduced a powerful new AI tool, OmniHuman-1, capable of generating realistic deepfakes, sparking significant market interest and debate.

Alibaba’s AI-driven move to scale up its advanced technologies has been implemented by other competitors in the global market as well. Mistral, the French AI startup, recently announced it will also invest billions to build data centers in France, and President Emmanuel Macron just signed a €50 billion agreement with the United Arab Emirates to build the largest AI data center in Europe. The government of the United States, along with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Softbank are investing $500 billion in the Stargate Project for the development of advanced AI technologies in the U.S.