Alibaba Cloud Expansion Sparks AI Investment Plans Amid Cautionary Market Sentiment
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., trading under the ticker BABA on the NYSE, is expanding its cloud infrastructure across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. This move comes as the company increases investment in artificial intelligence.
The expansion will support more localized cloud and AI services and deepen Alibaba's competition with Amazon.com, Inc. and Alphabet Inc. outside Asia. Alibaba also unveiled new AI chips for advanced model training and is developing foundation models with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters.
The company plans to build a 20-gigawatt global data center network by 2032. Citigroup estimates the infrastructure could support more than $160 billion in external cloud revenue.
Alibaba stock fell over 3% in Wednesday's premarket session as investors turned cautious on large-cap technology and China-linked stocks. The company announced a $53 billion, three-year AI investment plan in 2025 and has signaled that capital spending will continue to rise.