Alibaba enters robotaxi market with investment in Ant Group-backed Hello (www.scmp.com)

Alibaba has made a strategic investment in Hello, the Ant Group–backed ride-hailing startup, to jointly push robotaxi commercialization and scaled fleet operations. The undisclosed stake will fund collaboration across algorithm platforms and “smart driving” large language models, with Alibaba Cloud handling R&D, algorithm iteration, UX optimization and operational efficiency. The move follows Hello’s roll-out of the Hello Robot1 vehicle and comes amid stiff competition from Tesla, Waymo/Alphabet and Chinese rivals such as Baidu Apollo Go, Pony.ai and WeRide. Technically, the partnership signals heavier integration of cloud-native AI into autonomous stacks: plans include developing multimodal vision and voice models, verticalized LLMs for driving and service-specific applications, and “intelligent” cockpit systems that merge perception, natural language interfaces and domain-specific decision models. That blend could accelerate real-world deployment by improving human–vehicle interaction, fleet orchestration, telemetry-driven model updates and edge-cloud inference pipelines. For the AI/ML community, the deal highlights growing emphasis on large, specialized models in safety-critical mobility, the importance of scalable algorithm ops, and intensified competition over data, compute and platform-level dominance in the robotaxi market.