Alibaba to boost AI spending as China tech giant sees AGI as new start

Alibaba Group Holding plans to increase its capital expenditures on artificial intelligence infrastructure from the original 380 billion yuan (US$53 billion) over the next three years, the group’s CEO said on Wednesday.

Eddie Wu Yongming, also the chairman of Alibaba Cloud, said at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, that Alibaba’s cloud unit aimed to become “the world’s leading full-stack AI service provider” from computing power to models. Wu did not, however, disclose the additional budget for AI infrastructure spending.

Wu also announced at a forum for international users of Alibaba Cloud the company’s biggest ever overseas investment in AI infrastructure with plans to launch the company’s first data centres in Brazil, France and the Netherlands, with additional data centers to be added in Malaysia, Dubai, Mexico, Japan and South Korea in the coming year. The investment amount for new data centres was also not disclosed.

“The overseas market is a very important market for us,” he said. “The growth rate of our overseas infrastructure expansion is far exceeding our domestic growth rate. We hope that in a few years, the scale of our international data centres will be five times what it was in 2022.”

According to Wu, Alibaba Cloud currently operates in 29 regions globally.

Alibaba’s shares gained 9.2 per cent to HK$174 on Wednesday. Alibaba owns the Post.