Alibaba to boost AI spending as China tech giant sees AGI as new start

Alibaba Group Holding plans to increase its capital expenditures on artificial intelligence infrastructure from the original 380 billion yuan (US$53 billion) over the next three years, the group’s CEO said on Wednesday.

Eddie Wu Yongming, also the chairman of Alibaba Cloud, said at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, that Alibaba’s cloud unit aimed to become “the world’s leading full-stack AI service provider” from computing power to models. Wu did not, however, disclose the additional budget for AI infrastructure spending.

Alibaba’s shares gained 6.3 per cent to HK$169.40 as of 11am on Wednesday. Alibaba owns the Post.

Wu’s pledge came as Alibaba is seeing surging demand for AI services and “an increasingly clear technology trajectory” from AI agents to AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ASI (artificial super intelligence). AGI refers to a type of AI that reaches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities, while ASI refers to a hypothetical future form of AI with intellectual scope far beyond human intelligence.

“AGI will not be the end but a new beginning,” Wu said. The technology would save humans from 80 per cent of existing jobs, and the arrival of ASI would create “a group of super scientists and engineers” to solve problems from healthcare to climate change in “unthinkable ways”, he said.

Wu’s pledge of additional investment also mirrored increased AI spending by US tech giants. US chip giant Nvidia said it would invest US$100 billion into OpenAI to help the US AI giant build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers for next-generation AI infrastructure.