Alibaba shares rise over 6% after CEO unveils plans to boost AI spending; new data centers (www.cnbc.com)

Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares jumped more than 6% after CEO Eddie Wu announced the company will increase spending in its AI businesses and unveiled new products, including the latest Qwen3‑Max large language model. Wu reiterated a three‑year, 380 billion yuan ($53B) AI infrastructure initiative and said Alibaba will sustain and further raise investment to prepare for what he called the “artificial superintelligence” era, projecting global cumulative AI investment topping $4 trillion over the next five years. The stock move pushed the company’s year‑to‑date gains past 107%. Technically, Alibaba is doubling down on a “full‑stack” AI play: expanding cloud computing capacity and building out data centers (new sites in Brazil, France and the Netherlands, with more coming to Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Dubai) to support training and deployment of large models. It also highlighted deployment of in‑house AI accelerators via a deal with Unicom and its semiconductor unit — an effort aligned with China’s push for chip self‑sufficiency amid U.S.–China tensions. For the AI/ML community, this signals greater global cloud capacity and hardware availability for training large models, faster regional inference/latency options, and intensified competition in model development and infrastructure services.