Alibaba stocks have started up a tremendous rise in their price. This increase comes on the heels of their own announcement that they would be increasing investments in artificial intelligence (AI). Forward guidance by the company at first supported their Hong Kong-listed shares which surged more than 6% to their highest point since 2021. In U.S. premarket trading, shares jumped by 9.3%, trading at $4.21 per share as of 4:21 a.m. ET. This is an impressive year-to-date Alibaba gain of just over 107%.
The surge in Alibaba’s stock comes on the heels of the company’s strategic positioning of Alibaba Cloud as a “full-stack AI service provider.” By using its own data centers, this initiative provides the farms of computing muscle needed for training and deploying large AI models. This is key given the hyper-competitive, fast-moving AI tech marketplace.
A few weeks ago, Alibaba announced their new flagship large language models, Qwen3-Max. In addition, they delivered some pretty cool product updates to their expanding and ever popular AI product line. These moves highlight the company’s intent to continue to strengthen its core and expand its overall portfolio in the quickly advancing world of technology.
In the race to develop more advanced AI capabilities, Alibaba made big promises.
“We are vigorously advancing a three-year, 380 billion yuan AI infrastructure initiative with plans to sustain and further increase our investment according to our strategic vision in anticipation of the artificial superintelligence era,” – Wu, CEO of Alibaba.
Alibaba has partnered with Unicom, the second largest of China’s three telecom operators, one of China’s e-commerce market titans. Under this partnership, Unicom will deploy AI accelerators developed by Alibaba’s semiconductor unit, further solidifying Alibaba’s foothold in the competitive tech industry.
Tensions between the U.S. and China are rising with breathtaking speed. In reply, Alibaba and other Chinese tech companies have redoubled their moves towards chip self-sufficiency. This strategic focus is even more essential today to preserve our national competitive advantages and battle space operational independence in an increasingly adversarial and uncertain geopolitical landscape.
“The cumulative investment in global AI in the next five years will exceed $4 trillion, and this is the largest investment in computing power and research and development in history,” – Wu commented on the broader implications of AI investment.