Alibaba shares jump 9% in U.S. premarket after CEO unveils plans to boost AI spending

Alibaba shares soared in Hong Kong and U.S. premarket trading on Wednesday after the company said it will invest more in artificial intelligence and rolled out new AI products and updates. 

The tech giant’s Hong Kong-listed shares jumped over 6%, to reach their highest point since 2021. Total gains over the year-to-date topped 107%. 

In the U.S., shares were 9.3% higher in premarket trade at 4.21 a.m. ET.

Alibaba plans to increase spending on AI models and infrastructure development, on top of the 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) over three years it announced in February, Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu said Wednesday at Alibaba Cloud’s annual flagship technology conference.

“We are vigorously advancing a three-year, 380 billion [yuan] AI infrastructure initiative with plans to sustain and further increase our investment according to our strategic vision in anticipation of the [artificial superintelligence] era,” Wu said. 

So-called “artificial superintelligence” refers to AI that would hypothetically surpass the power and intelligence of the human brain, with the hypothetical benchmark becoming a growing focus of major AI companies. 

Alibaba also officially unveiled the latest version of its Qwen large language models — the Qwen3-Max — on Wednesday, along with a series of other updates to its suite of AI product offerings. 

Wu highlighted that Alibaba Cloud is strategically positioned as a “full-stack AI service provider,” delivering the computing power required for training and deploying large AI models on the cloud through its own data centers.

“The cumulative investment in global AI in the next five years will exceed $4 trillion, and this is the largest investment in computing power and research and development in history,” he added.

Alibaba Cloud will also launch its first data centres in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, the company said at the conference, and add more data centres in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai next year.

Last month, the company secured a deal with Unicom, a Chinese e-commerce giant, which will deploy Alibaba’s AI accelerators from its semiconductor unit. Chinese tech firms have been focusing on securing chip self-sufficiency as tensions grow between the U.S. and China.