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.
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