Alibaba Shares Surge Following Nvidia Partnership and Data Center Expansion Plans

The sweeping announcements, made at Alibaba’s annual Apsara Conference, signal the Chinese tech giant’s intent to elevate AI as a core pillar of its business alongside its traditional e-commerce operations. The company's U.S.-listed shares also climbed nearly 10% in premarket trading.

“The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our expectations,” Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said during the event. “The industry's demand for AI infrastructure has also far exceeded our expectations.”

Wu said Alibaba would step up its AI investments, although he did not disclose specific figures. Earlier this year, the company pledged to spend 380 billion yuan (approximately $53 billion) on AI-related infrastructure over the next three years.

 

A central highlight of the conference was Alibaba's new partnership with Nvidia. The collaboration will focus on developing core AI infrastructure capabilities, including data synthesis, model training, environmental simulation, and validation testing. The announcement comes just days after Nvidia revealed a separate $100 billion investment plan with OpenAI.

While Alibaba did not confirm whether its new data centers would use Nvidia chips, the partnership is seen as a strategic move to deepen the company's AI ecosystem in the face of mounting competition from rivals like Tencent and DeepSeek.

 

As part of its infrastructure push, Alibaba Cloud announced plans to open its first data centers in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands. Additional facilities are set to launch in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai over the next year. These new sites will add to Alibaba's existing network of 91 data centers across 29 regions globally.

“The overseas data center investments will help expand Alibaba's influence among international AI developers and enterprise users,” said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at research firm Omdia.

 

Alibaba also introduced Qwen3-Max, its most advanced large language model to date. Boasting over 1 trillion parameters, the model is designed to excel at tasks such as code generation and autonomous decision-making, said Zhou Jingren, Chief Technology Officer at Alibaba Cloud.

Unlike traditional chatbots, Qwen3-Max features autonomous agent capabilities, meaning it can take initiative and act on goals with minimal user input. According to Alibaba, third-party benchmarks such as Tau2-Bench indicate that Qwen3-Max outperforms competitor models, including Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1, in key metrics.

The company’s aggressive push into AI comes as China’s tech firms race to compete in the rapidly evolving global AI market, with infrastructure, talent, and computational power increasingly seen as strategic advantages.