Alibaba Stock Soars To Multi-Year High After Supercharging $53B AI Plan

Sep 24 Alibaba Group Holding BABA shares climbed nearly 8% in Hong Kong on Wednesday, touching their highest level in close to four years. The rally came after CEO Eddie Wu said the company plans to expand its artificial intelligence spending beyond the previously announced $53 billion, or 380 billion yuan, earmarked for infrastructure over the next three years.

Wu, who also leads Alibaba Cloud, spoke at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou. He noted that global AI investment could reach $4 trillion over the next five years, and emphasized that Alibaba's cloud business aims to become a leading full-stack AI service provider, offering everything from computing power to models.

While Wu did not provide a new budget figure, the announcement underscores Alibaba's determination to keep pace with global peers. The move also reflects a broader surge in AI spending by U.S. technology firms.

Nvidia NVDA, for instance, recently announced plans to invest as much as $100 billion in OpenAI, backing the buildout of large-scale AI data centers.

In addition, Alibaba unveiled Qwen3-Omni, its open-source large language model designed to handle text, images, audio, and video, broadening its push into generative AI.