President Xi Jinping’s high-profile meeting with technology business leaders last month significantly enhanced the confidence of Chinese companies, prompting Alibaba Group Holding to make substantial investments in artificial intelligence (AI), according to company chairman and co-founder Joe Tsai during a conference in Singapore.
“I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of that event,” Tsai said on Wednesday at a gathering hosted by US broadcaster CNBC. “The message is very, very clear that the government is looking to private enterprises to come back and boost the economy.”
Xi’s business symposium in February – which included Alibaba founder Jack Ma and other executives from major Chinese tech companies such as Tencent Holdings, as well as start-ups like DeepSeek – further solidified Alibaba’s confidence in its AI investment, according to Tsai.
In a show of its commitment to AI, the company recently announced plans to invest at least 380 billion yuan (US$52 billion) in cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years. This marks China’s largest-ever computing project financed by a single private business.
The planned outlay also exceeds Alibaba’s total spending on AI infrastructure over the past decade and is equivalent to half of the initial US$100 billion investment in the Stargate AI initiative promoted by the US.
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
