China's e-commerce giant ramps up AI investment to innovate business landscape

BEIJING - The Qwen foundation model, developed by China's Alibaba Group, has spawned over 100,000 derived models, claiming the top spot globally. This advancement comes as the e-commerce giant continues to ramp up its investment in AI, aiming to bring about transformative changes to its business landscape.

Alibaba recently announced that it would invest more than 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) in building cloud and AI hardware infrastructure in the next three years.

"We will focus on the domestic and overseas e-commerce business, cloud computing technologies and internet platform products," said Eddie Wu, Alibaba Group's CEO, at an earnings call in February.

The development of AI is bringing about significant changes to the industry, Wu said. "Our planned investment in cloud and AI infrastructure over the next three years is set to exceed what we have spent over the past decade."

The substantial investment increase in research and development of basic AI models is expected to uphold the group's advanced technologies and its leading position in the industry, while also driving the development of AI native applications.

Alibaba Group is an important player in the AI landscape within the Asian market, boasting the largest cloud services scale in Asia and ranking fourth globally.

Through deep integration of cloud and AI technologies, Alibaba Cloud aims to become one of the largest cloud computing networks delivering AI intelligence.

"We anticipate 90 percent of future tokens, intelligent output generated by models, will be created and processed through cloud networks, as only cloud architecture can efficiently handle such massive computational demands," Wu said.

He said the next three years could be the most intense and substantial period for cloud infrastructure development in Alibaba's history.

Leveraging its globally distributed data centers, the company will deliver these resources to application developers worldwide with unparalleled speed and accessibility, Wu said.

"If AI is one of the most common commodities in the future, just like electricity today, then cloud computing networks would perform like a power grid," he said.

Alibaba will also keep advancing AI integration with its e-commerce platform Taobao to redefine lifestyle consumption.

Taobao is developing multiple AI-driven initiatives to enhance consumer engagement and transaction efficiency. The upcoming AI-powered solutions will also be applied across various consumption scenarios, including purchase decisions, Wu said.

"We believe AI serves as an important driver in elevating Taobao's user engagement and commercial value," he said.

Alibaba is also considering evolving its Amap from a navigation tool into a lifestyle services gateway by embedding AI innovations. With its massive 170 million daily active user base, Amap will hopefully become China's next-generation AI-driven platform for location-based consumer experiences, Wu said.

To meet the AI development needs of consumer business, Alibaba Group has recently announced hundreds of recruitment positions. AI technology and product related research and development positions account for 90 percent of these new positions. They will be engaged in the cutting-edge technologies and applications such as text, multi-modal large models and AI Agent.

"We take AI as a once-in-a-generation industry transformation opportunity. Our primary goal is to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), continuously pushing the boundaries of model intelligence," Wu said.