Alibaba shares leap on Nvidia partnership, data center plans

By Liam Mo and Eduardo Baptista

Alibaba BABA announced on Wednesday a partnership with Nvidia, global data center expansion plans and new artificial intelligence products, as it positions AI as a core business priority alongside its traditional e-commerce operation.

The announcement helped send Hong Kong-listed shares of the Chinese company up nearly 10% to a four-year high on Wednesday, as investors welcomed its plan to double down on AI amid grueling competition with local peers that include DeepSeek and Tencent 700.

Alibaba's U.S.-listed shares BABA also jumped nearly 10% in premarket trading.

"The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our expectations, and the industry's demand for AI infrastructure has also far exceeded our expectations," Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said at its annual Apsara Conference on Wednesday.

Wu said Alibaba would increase spending further without specifying amounts. Earlier this year, the company announced plans to invest 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) in AI-related infrastructure over the next three years.

At the conference, Alibaba said it would partner with Nvidia NVDA to develop physical AI capabilities such as data synthesis, model training, environmental simulation and validation testing.

The company also announced plans to open its first data centers in Brazil, France and the Netherlands, with additional facilities planned for Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Dubai over the coming year. This will expand Alibaba's current network of 91 data centers across 29 regions worldwide.

It did not say whether the new data centers would be powered by Nvidia chips.

"Alibaba's 2025 Apsara Conference demonstrated strong results from years of AI investment," said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at technology research firm Omdia.

"The overseas data center investments will help expand Alibaba's influence among international AI developers and enterprise users."

Its expansion plan and the partnership with the U.S. chipmaker come just days after Nvidia, whose must-have chips are powering a global AI boom, announced a deal to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and supply it with data center chips.

Alibaba also unveiled on Wednesday its largest ever AI language model, the Qwen3-Max.

The model contains more than 1 trillion parameters, or variables that determine how an AI system processes information, and shows particular strength in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities, Zhou Jingren, chief technology officer at Alibaba Cloud, said at the conference.

Autonomous agent capabilities mean the AI system requires fewer human prompts than a chatbot like ChatGPT, and can make decisions and take action independently towards a goal set by the human user.

Alibaba cited third-party benchmarks, such as Tau2-Bench, saying the model outperformed rival products including Anthropic's Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in certain metrics.

The company released the Qwen3 model in April.

Additional AI products unveiled Wednesday included Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal, immersive system useful for virtual and augmented reality applications such as smart glasses and intelligent cockpits.

Last month, Alibaba reported strong quarterly results, driven by its cloud business, whose revenue surged 26%, highlighting the company's progress in monetizing AI services.

($1 = 7.1157 Chinese yuan renminbi)