Alibaba Group Holding will invest at least 380 billion yuan (US$52.4 billion) in its cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure over the next three years, in China's largest-ever computing project financed by a single private business, the company announced on Monday in a show of commitment to AI.

The planned outlay exceeds Alibaba's total spending on AI infrastructure over the past decade and matches half of the initial US$100 billion investment in the Stargate AI plan promoted by the US.

In a conference call with analysts last week, CEO Eddie Wu Yongming said the company plans to "aggressively invest" in AI and cloud computing infrastructure over the next three years.

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Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, has said the plans underscore its "focus on AI-driven growth and its role as a leading global cloud provider".

Alibaba's investment plan has grabbed national attention amid a national frenzy to apply AI following the popularity of DeepSeek's models in recent months. The official Xinhua news agency on Monday first reported Alibaba's investment plan.

Alibaba's recent earnings report showed better-than-expected profit and revenue for the December quarter, boosting investor excitement.

Alibaba Cloud, one of the tech giant's key growth pillars, saw revenue jump 13 per cent year on year to 31.7 billion yuan, driven by triple-digit AI-related product revenue for the sixth consecutive quarter. It was the unit's fastest quarterly growth in three years.

Alibaba "appears poised to capture the AI cloud opportunity" with its latest investment plan, Morgan Stanley analysts said in a research note on Monday. The analysts raised their price target for the stock, projecting that Alibaba Cloud revenue would double in the next three years, reaching 240 billion yuan in 2028.

Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares dropped 2.5 per cent to HK$135.1 on Monday morning, which remain around their highest level since late 2021. Its stock price gained 15 per cent on Friday.

The AI capabilities of China's largest e-commerce and cloud services firm have gained increasing global recognition in the past month. Its progress captured global attention this month when news broke that Apple had chosen Alibaba as one of its mainland China AI partners for its Apple Intelligence feature on iPhones.

The strength of Alibaba's Qwen models is also being recognised by developers, who are using Alibaba's tech as a base for an increasing number of open-source models. Several of the top 10 models on the developer platform Hugging Face were trained and developed on Qwen.

Alibaba also teased that it would soon launch a new reasoning AI model built on its Qwen 2.5-Max model, a currently closed-source model that the company has compared favourably to DeepSeek's models. The move is expected to offer developers an alternative to the open-source DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model that has been widely adopted by cloud providers since its launch last month.

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