Alibaba announced on Wednesday a sweeping set of initiatives, including a partnership with Nvidia, new global data centers, and its largest-ever AI products, underscoring its pivot to make artificial intelligence a central business priority alongside e-commerce.
The news sent Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares up nearly 10% to a four-year high, while its U.S.-listed shares also rose by a similar margin in premarket trading.
“The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our expectations, and the industry’s demand for AI infrastructure has also far exceeded our expectations,” Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said at the company’s annual Apsara Conference. He added that spending on AI will be increased, though without specifying figures. Earlier this year, Alibaba pledged 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) for AI infrastructure investments over three years.
As part of its strategy, Alibaba will collaborate with Nvidia to enhance physical AI capabilities including data synthesis, model training, environmental simulation, and validation testing.
The company also unveiled an ambitious global data center expansion plan, announcing facilities in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, with more to follow in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai within the next year. This will add to Alibaba’s current network of 91 data centers across 29 regions. The company did not specify whether Nvidia chips would power these new facilities.
At the same event, Alibaba launched its most advanced AI language model to date, Qwen3-Max, boasting over 1 trillion parameters. According to CTO Zhou Jingren, the model demonstrates strong performance in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities, allowing the AI to act more independently toward user-defined goals compared to traditional chatbots like ChatGPT.
Benchmark tests such as Tau2-Bench reportedly show Qwen3-Max outperforming competitors including Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in specific categories.
Additional AI products showcased included Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal system designed for immersive applications in virtual and augmented reality, with potential use cases in smart glasses and intelligent vehicle cockpits.
The announcements come shortly after Nvidia revealed a $100 billion investment deal with OpenAI, highlighting the intensifying race in AI infrastructure.
Alibaba’s cloud division, which reported 26% revenue growth last quarter, is emerging as a key growth driver as the company monetizes its AI services more aggressively.