From shopping carts to superchips: Alibaba rediscovers edge with bold billion-dollar AI pivot
The Hangzhou-based company is also investing heavily in-house. In February, it announced plans to spend 380 billion yuan ($53.42 billion) in AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years. More than 100 billion yuan has already gone into AI infrastructure and research in the past year, said Wei Sun, principal analyst at Counterpoint Research.
“Alibaba is positioning itself as China’s most aggressive AI investor,” said Sun. “This level of spending is unprecedented among private Chinese firms and rivals the capex trajectories of U.S. tech titans.”
Counterpoint’s Sun also noted in an email that a strategy of integrating AI models, robots and chips “positions Alibaba as a unique hybrid of Google [AI & chips] + Amazon [services & e-commerce].”
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