Alibaba Group Holding’s (NYSE:BABA) shares rose to their highest in nearly four years on Wednesday after revealing plans to ramp up AI spending past an original $50 billion-plus target.
Alibaba now plans to boost its capital spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure beyond the originally planned 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) over the next three years, the company’s CEO said on Wednesday. Wu, however, did not disclose the additional budget for AI infrastructure spending, as per reports.
Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu anticipates overall investment in artificial intelligence accelerating to some $4 trillion worldwide over the next five years—and Alibaba needs to keep up, Bloomberg reported.
Eddie Wu, also the chairman of Alibaba Cloud, said at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, that Alibaba’s (NYSE:BABA) cloud unit aimed to become “the world’s leading full-stack AI service provider” from computing power to models.
Alibaba’s shares gained 7.8% to HK$171.80 as of 1.45pm on Wednesday.
The commitment to increase investment aligns with rising AI expenditures by U.S. tech giants such as Nvidia (NVDA), which announced plans to invest $100 billion in OpenAI to support the construction and deployment of at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers.
Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) on Tuesday unveiled its open source large language model called Qwen3-Omni, which can process text, images, audio, and video.