Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba plans to make an investment of 380bn yuan ($52.4bn) in its cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years.
The company indicated about the investment while announcing results without details about the exact figure, reported Reuters.
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The funds will be used to expand the company’s existing data centres and enhance its AI infrastructure to meet the increasing demand for AI applications, The Tech Portal reported.
The company aims to capitalise on the growing need for computing power in modern AI models to strengthen its position as a provider of cloud-based AI solutions.
The investment amount is claimed to exceed Alibaba’s spending in AI and cloud computing during the past decade.
The funding is part of the company’s strategy at “reinforcing [Alibaba’s] commitment to long-term technological innovation…[and] underscores the company’s focus on AI-driven growth, Fortune reported.
For the three months ended 31 December 2024, the company reported revenues of $38.58bn, up 8% year-on-year.
Alibaba Cloud, the company’s cloud computing division, reported an 11% year-over-year increase in revenue, with AI-related products achieving triple-digit growth for the sixth consecutive quarter.
Earlier in February 2025, Alibaba’s cloud-computing services unit integrated Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s AI models on its platform.
Alibaba Cloud users gained access to the PAI Model Gallery, featuring open-source LLMs, including DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 models.
In January 2025, Alibaba introduced its latest AI model, Qwen 2.5-Max, which it claims can outperform models, including DeepSeek V3, in various benchmarks such as Arena-Hard, LiveBench, LiveCodeBench, and GPQA-Diamond.
The model also demonstrated strong performance in assessments such as MMLU-Pro.
