On February 24, Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, announced that over the next three years, Alibaba will invest more than CNY 380 billion in the construction of cloud and AI hardware infrastructure. This also sets a new record for the largest-ever investment by a private enterprise in China in the field of cloud and AI hardware infrastructure construction.
Alibaba's investment comes after two significant events. Firstly, the domestic AI industry has experienced explosive growth. Secondly, a symposium on private enterprises was held. Eddie Wu stated, "The explosion of AI has far exceeded expectations. The domestic technology industry is in its ascendancy with immense potential." a symposium on private enterprises
Moving forward, Alibaba will continue to focus on three major business: domestic and international e-commerce, AI + cloud computing technology, and internet platform products. Specifically in the field of AI, Alibaba will increase investments in the following three areas:
Firstly, investments in AI and cloud computing infrastructure. The AI era has clear and substantial demands for infrastructure, with the estimated investment in cloud and AI infrastructure over the next three years expected to surpass the total of the past decade.
Secondly, significantly boosting R&D investments in AI foundation models to ensure technological advancement and industry leadership, as well as driving the development of AI applications.
Thirdly, investing in the AI transformation and upgrading of existing businesses. For e-commerce and other internet platform businesses, AI technology upgrades will bring significant opportunities for enhancing user value. Therefore, Alibaba will continuously increase R&D investments in AI applications and computing power, utilizing AI technology to deeply transform and upgrade its various businesses, seizing new development opportunities in the AI era.
Additionally, Eddie Wu revealed that Alibaba will soon release a deep reasoning model based on Qwen2.5-Max. Currently, Alibaba Cloud is Asia's leading cloud computing company, and Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen large model has become one of the world's top open-source models.
Last week, Alibaba Group released its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2025 (ended December 31, 2024), showing that the company's revenue was CNY 280.15 billion, up 8% year-on-year, with a net profit of CNY 46.434 billion, with a year-on-year growth of 333%. Furthermore, the company's e-commerce business accelerated its growth during the quarter, Alibaba Cloud's commercial revenue returned to double-digit growth, and AI-related product revenue maintained triple-digit growth for six consecutive quarters.
It is worth noting that Alibaba significantly increased its capital expenditures in the third quarter of fiscal year 2025, reaching CNY 31.8 billion, an 80% increase from the previous quarter.