Alibaba, the Chinese tech conglomerate, has announced a colossal 380 billion yuan (£41.5 billion) investment in artificial intelligence and cloud computing over the next three years.
The news follows the public rehabilitation of the firm’s founder Jack Ma, who recently re-emerged alongside President Xi Jinping and other tech leaders at a high-profile summit in China.
Ma, once feted as the face of Chinese entrepreneurship, fell out of favour with Beijing five years ago after criticising China’s financial regulators. That clash culminated in the scrapping of Ant Group’s $37 billion initial public offering in 2020, once set to be the world’s largest. Ma all but disappeared from public life as Xi’s administration cracked down on influential tech billionaires.
However, his front-row seat at last week’s “tech summit” — flanked by notables including Liang Wenfeng of DeepSeek (an emerging AI challenger to American models), and executives from electric vehicle giant BYD and telecoms powerhouse Huawei — signals a marked shift. With the economy flagging post-Covid, Beijing appears to be easing its clampdown on big tech, instead placing renewed emphasis on the sector to drive growth.
Alibaba has branched out from its original B2B e-commerce roots, developing thriving logistics arms and financial spin-offs such as Ant Group. Its cloud division, Alibaba Cloud, already hosts significant R&D operations worldwide and recently launched its own AI offering, QWen, available to iPhone users in China via a dedicated app.
Eddie Wu Yongming, Alibaba’s chief executive, says the company intends to spend more on cloud and AI in three years than it has invested in the last decade. “We are excited by the business opportunities being unlocked by this new technology cycle,” he said. According to Alibaba’s latest financial report, quarterly profits reached 48.9 billion yuan (£5.3 billion), beating market forecasts and reinforcing investor confidence in the firm’s expansion plans.
Xi Jinping is betting heavily on advanced technologies — from AI to green energy solutions — to spur the next phase of China’s economic progress. Having seen a period of rocky growth and faced with renewed US tariff threats, Beijing now looks to homegrown champions for global tech leadership. DeepSeek’s recent unveiling of a cost-effective AI reasoning model with the potential to rival leading US systems has ignited national pride, though many experts maintain a degree of scepticism about its ability to overtake established players.
For Alibaba, the renewed support at the highest levels of government offers a chance to refocus on innovation after years of regulatory uncertainty. The question remains whether this investment — and Jack Ma’s return to the fold — will help China close the gap with American tech giants, especially in AI, a domain seen as key to the country’s global competitiveness.