Chinese Giant Alibaba to Invest Over $52 Billion in AI Over the Next Three Years 

Chinese giant Alibaba on Monday announced that it plans to invest over $52 billion in the cloud computing and artificial intelligence sector over the next three years. The investment exceeds the company’s total AI and cloud spending in the past decade, the company said.  

A few days ago, Alibaba Group also announced financial results for the quarter ending December 31, 2024, and revenue increased by 8% year-on-year. 

During the earnings call, Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, said, “We see AI as a once-in-a-generation industry transformation opportunity, and the primary goal of our AI strategy is to pursue the realisation of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and continuously push the boundaries of model intelligence capabilities.” It was also reported by The Information that Alibaba plans to release a new reasoning model. 

“Alibaba Cloud will become the most important AI infrastructure and one of the largest cloud computing networks for outputting AI intelligence, which is Alibaba Cloud’s goal,” added Wu. 

Recently, it was reported that Alibaba plans to introduce AI features in China. Apple initially considered working with Baidu, Tencent, ByteDance, and DeepSeek but ultimately chose Alibaba. 

Apple Intelligence’s delay in China was due to its reliance on ChatGPT, which is unavailable in the country. 

Alibaba introduced its Qwen series of AI models in April 2023. Most recently, it unveiled the Qwen2.5 Max, which outperforms DeepSeek’s V3 model. The model can also control mobile and computer screens, similar to Anthropic’s Computer Use and OpenAI’s Operator. 

Qwen’s models can be accessed for free on the web chatbot application. With the exception of their latest Qwen2.5 Max, most of Qwen’s models are available for open-source use via Hugging Face.

Alibaba’s investment is yet another landmark event, signifying that China is investing heavily in building an AI ecosystem that will outperform the United States.