Alibaba's CEO says he doesn't see 'much of an issue' with an AI bubble and plans to invest 'aggressively' (www.businessinsider.com)

Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu pushed back on talk of an AI bubble during the company's quarterly call, saying customer demand for AI far outstrips the company’s ability to deploy servers and that "AI resources will continue to be under supply" over the next three years. Alibaba reported 247.8 billion yuan ($34.8B) in revenue for the quarter (up 5% YoY) while net income fell 53% to 20.6 billion yuan after heavy spending on AI and commerce. The cloud unit — which includes the new Qwen model and app that reached 10 million downloads in its first week — grew 34% to 39.8 billion yuan, and Wu reiterated plans to "invest aggressively" in infrastructure, suggesting the previously announced 380 billion yuan three‑year AI investment may be too conservative. For the AI/ML community, Wu’s comments underscore a shift from hype to capital-intensive deployment: the bottleneck isn’t models but compute, servers, chips and data‑center capacity. That aligns with broader industry capex surges (Big Tech capex expected near $320B this year) and contrasts with more cautious voices who warn of overheated investor expectations. Practically, Alibaba’s posture signals continued demand for cloud GPU/accelerator capacity, higher infrastructure spending, and accelerated enterprise adoption of AI across product development, manufacturing and operations — all of which will shape model hosting costs, latency options and availability of large‑scale training and inference resources.