Alibaba bets all on AI, plans to spend $380 billion over three years

Chinese internet giant Alibaba is making a big push into artificial intelligence (AI). Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming has reportedly made it clear that he wants to fully realize AI-driven in the company's existing businesses.

Alibaba made an announcement on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (Feb. 24) that it plans to invest at least 380 billion yuan (about $53 billion) over the next three years to build cloud and AI infrastructure. This huge investment not only exceeds Alibaba's total investment over the past decade, but also sets a record high for a private Chinese company in the field of cloud and AI hardware infrastructure construction.

Alibaba has launched a secret program called "Project T" to accelerate the development of AI technology, according to sources. The project will focus on exploring cutting-edge areas such as AI engines, large language models (LLM) and multimodality. The fact that employees are joining the program on a "secondment" basis is a clear indication of its strategic importance.

The insider revealed, "We believe that the next killer app based on mature AI technology, one that is even more popular than Jitterbug, could be coming soon."

Alibaba has been making a lot of moves in the field of AI recently. on March 6, Alibaba released and open-sourced a new inference model, Qwen-32B, which is comparable to DeepSeek-R1 in terms of performance, but with only 1/20th of the number of references. later, Alibaba launched its flagship AI application, Neoquark, based on the big model of Tongyi. -New Quark. New Quark has been fully upgraded to an "AI super box", which can accomplish various tasks such as AI search, AI writing, AI graph generation, etc. Alibaba has also launched its flagship AI application, New Quark, based on the generalized big model.

In its core e-commerce divisions such as Taobao and Tmall, Alibaba is also actively promoting the use of AI technology. The teams are working closely with engineers from Tongyi Qianqian to develop new features with a view to improving operational efficiency and user experience. Examples include using AI to optimize product recommendations, intelligent customer service, improving search accuracy, and even generating product descriptions and images through AI.

Alibaba Group Chairman Jonathan Tsai said at a recent forum that the potential market size for AI is at least $10 trillion, and possibly even larger. That size, he argued, exceeds industries like transportation and health insurance, "which is why everyone should be excited about AI."

Not only Alibaba, other domestic technology giants are also actively laying out in the field of AI. For example, Tencent has launched a hybrid big model and applied it to advertising, games and other businesses; Baidu has continued to invest in areas such as automatic driving and intelligent cloud.

In the face of fierce competition in the market, can Alibaba leverage its advantages in e-commerce, cloud computing and other fields to seize the lead in the AI era? How will it use AI technology to reshape its business and create the next "killer" application? These are worth waiting to see.