Alibaba (9988.HK) announced on Wednesday a wide-ranging push into artificial intelligence (AI), unveiling a partnership with Nvidia, a global data centre expansion plan, and new AI products, as it seeks to make artificial intelligence a core business priority alongside its e-commerce operations.
The news sent its Hong Kong-listed shares soaring nearly 10% to a four-year high, with U.S.-listed shares (BABA.N) also jumping almost 10% in pre-market trading, as investors welcomed the company’s AI drive amid intensifying competition from domestic rivals such as DeepSeek and Tencent (0700.HK).
Speaking at the annual Apsara Conference, Alibaba’s chief executive Eddie Wu said, “The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our expectations, and the industry’s demand for AI infrastructure has also far exceeded our expectations.”
He added that the company would step up spending, though without disclosing figures. Earlier this year, Alibaba pledged 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) in AI infrastructure over three years.
Nvidia partnership and global data centres
At the conference, Alibaba revealed plans to work with U.S. chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA.O) on physical AI capabilities including data synthesis, model training, environmental simulation and validation testing.
It also announced that its first data centres in Brazil, France and the Netherlands will open soon, with further facilities planned for Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Dubai over the next year. This will add to its existing network of 91 data centres across 29 regions worldwide. The company did not say if the new sites would use Nvidia chips.
According to Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, “Alibaba’s 2025 Apsara Conference demonstrated strong results from years of AI investment. The overseas data centre investments will help expand Alibaba’s influence among international AI developers and enterprise users.”
The expansion follows Nvidia’s recent announcement of a deal to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and provide it with data centre chips.
New AI models and products
Alibaba also introduced its most advanced AI language model yet, the Qwen3-Max, which has more than one trillion parametres. Chief technology officer Zhou Jingren said the model excels in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities, meaning it requires fewer human prompts than systems such as ChatGPT and can independently pursue user-defined goals.
On benchmarks such as Tau2-Bench, Alibaba claimed Qwen3-Max outperformed competitors including Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in several categories. The Qwen3 series was first released in April.
Other launches included Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal system for immersive experiences in virtual and augmented reality, designed for applications such as smart glasses and intelligent vehicle cockpits.
Cloud business momentum
Alibaba’s pivot towards AI has already delivered results. Last month, the company reported strong quarterly earnings driven by its cloud business, where revenue rose 26%, underscoring its progress in turning AI into a major growth engine.
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The collective-defence agreement between Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signals that regional powers no longer want to rely solely on external security guarantees. Whether it becomes a stabilising deterrent or another axis of rivalry remains unresolved.
Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains limited on Thursday, with no increase in vessel crossings as U.S.-Iran talks to resolve the conflict remained stalled. Nine commodity vessels transited the key waterway on Wednesday, unchanged from the previous day, according to Kpler data.
Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has slowed, according to the latest data, as uncertainty over the waterway’s reopening kept most shipowners away. Six commodity vessels crossed the strait on Tuesday, down from nine the day before and below the 10-day daily average of 11.
Iran has said the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed until the U.S. fulfils the terms of an interim deal, including lifting the maritime blockade and sanctions and releasing Iran’s frozen assets.
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