Alibaba bets big on AI, to invest $53 billion in 3 years
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s CEO Eddie Wu said the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is now the Chinese company’s “primary objective.”
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba plans to invest around USD 53 billion in its cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years, according to a report by Reuters.
Alibaba said the amount exceeds its spending in AI and cloud computing over the past decade.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s CEO said the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is now the Chinese company’s “primary objective.”
“Our first and foremost goal is to pursue AGI. We aim to continue to develop models that extend the boundaries of intelligence,” Eddie Wu told investors, according to a Bloomberg report. “The AI era presents a clear and massive demand for infrastructure.”
Alibaba is soon releasing a deep-reasoning AI model built on its Qwen 2.5-Max model, which will offer developers an alternative open-source model to DeepSeek’s R1.
The South China Morning Post reports that Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen family of AI models has been credited with the training and development of the world’s leading open-source LLMs, according to collaborative machine-learning platform and community Hugging Face.
As the global race for AI heats up, other Chinese firms are also pouring in funds to stay ahead of the curve.
TikTok owner ByteDance is said to have earmarked more than 150 billion yuan (USD 20.7 billion ) in capital expenditure for this year. A large part of that sum is focused on AI, Reuters had earlier reported.
