Alibaba soars in U.S. premarket after CEO vows bigger AI investment push

Alibaba Group’s shares rallied in Hong Kong and jumped more than 9% in U.S. premarket trading after Chief Executive Eddie Wu said the company will increase spending on artificial intelligence beyond the 380 billion yuan—about $53 billion over three years—announced earlier this year. The company unveiled Qwen3-Max, the latest version of its large language model, and positioned Alibaba Cloud as a full-stack AI provider, with new data centers slated for Brazil, France and the Netherlands and expansions across Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Dubai. Wu said global AI investment could exceed $4 trillion over the next five years. The escalation underscores China’s tech giants’ race to build computing capacity amid U.S.-China tensions over advanced chips; Alibaba recently struck a deal with Unicom to deploy in-house AI accelerators.

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