Alibaba shares surge on major AI spending push, Nvidia partnership

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. saw its shares surge on Wednesday, September 24,  after the Chinese tech giant unveiled ambitious plans to boost artificial intelligence spending, announced a key partnership with Nvidia, and launched its most powerful AI model to date.

The Hong Kong-based company stock (9988.HK) rose almost 10% to a four-year high in Hong Kong, and the U.S.-traded shares rose almost the same 9.3% in premarket trading.

The demonstration indicates that the investors have great confidence in the plan of CEO Eddie Wu to establish AI as a strategic pillar of its existing e-commerce enterprise.

The announcements were revealed during the annual Apsara Conference of Alibaba Cloud, where Wu announced that the firm was going to invest more than previously announced three-year and 380 billion yuan infrastructure AI project.

The pace of industry development in AI has greatly surpassed our expectations, said Wu, and it is important to highlight the role of Alibaba Cloud as a full-stack AI service provider.

One of the biggest sources of investor enthusiasm was the announcement of a joint venture with U.S. chip giant Nvidia.

The partnership will focus on developing physical AI capabilities such as information synthesis and model training.

This transaction is especially notable due to the tension that exists between the U.S. and China regarding state-of-the-art chip technology.

To further support its international growth, Alibaba has stated that it will open its first data centres in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, and expects to expand to Mexico, Japan and South Korea in the coming year.

It is also the official release of the company's flagship Qwen3-Max large language model with more than a trillion parameters.

Alibaba asserts that the model is superior to competitors such as Claude by Anthropic in certain tasks including code generation and autonomy.

This increased attention to AI highlights the fact that Alibaba is willing to fight hard to become a leader in the international AI competition.