Alibaba Shares Soar as Company Unveils Nvidia Partnership and AI Expansion Plans
Alibaba announced a major push into artificial intelligence on Wednesday, revealing a partnership with Nvidia, global data centre expansion, and its most powerful AI model to date. The announcement sent its Hong Kong-listed shares up nearly 10% to a four-year high, while its US-listed stock also gained almost 10% in premarket trading.
AI Takes Centre Stage for Alibaba
At its annual Apsara Conference, CEO Eddie Wu said the pace of AI development had surpassed expectations, creating huge demand for infrastructure. He pledged more investment without giving specific figures. Earlier this year, Alibaba committed 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) over three years to AI-related infrastructure.
As part of its latest plans, Alibaba will collaborate with Nvidia to build physical AI capabilities, including model training, data synthesis and validation testing. This aligns with global trends, as Nvidia chips remain the backbone of the AI industry.
Expanding Data Centre Footprint
To support its AI ambitions, Alibaba announced it will open new data centres in Brazil, France and the Netherlands, with more to follow in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Dubai next year. This expansion builds on its current network of 91 data centres across 29 regions worldwide.
Analysts say these overseas facilities will strengthen Alibaba’s reach with international developers and enterprise clients, helping it compete more effectively against rivals like Tencent and DeepSeek.
Launch of Qwen3-Max and Other AI Products
Alibaba also revealed Qwen3-Max, its largest-ever language model, boasting more than 1 trillion parameters. The company highlighted its strong performance in coding and autonomous agent tasks, which allow AI systems to act independently with minimal human prompts.
According to third-party benchmarks, Qwen3-Max outperformed rival models such as Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in some categories. This follows the April release of its Qwen3 model.
Other AI products unveiled include Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal system designed for immersive applications like virtual reality, augmented reality, smart glasses and intelligent cockpits.
Strengthening Cloud and AI Businesses
Last month, Alibaba reported strong quarterly results driven by its cloud unit, which grew 26% year-on-year. The expansion of AI-powered services is expected to further boost its cloud business, positioning the company as a stronger global competitor in both e-commerce and technology.
The announcement comes just days after Nvidia revealed plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, underlining the intense competition and rapid growth shaping the global AI market.
with inputs from Reuters
