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Investing.com-- Alibaba Group (HK:9988) shares jumped sharply on Wednesday after the Chinese e-commerce giant vowed to increase investment in its artificial intelligence infrastructure and announced a new collaboration with AI-darling Nvidia.
As of 2:24 PM ET, shares of Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) U.S.-traded ADRs were up 8.2% to $176.49. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong-listed shares of the company closed up 9.2% to HK$174.00, touching their highest level in nearly four years.
Alibaba said it is looking to open up its first data centers in France, the Netherlands and Brazil as part of a bid to enhance its global AI strategy. More facilities are also set to be added in Dubai, Malaysia, South Korea, Mexico and Japan in the coming year, broadening its network of operations to 29 regions across the world.
Earlier this year, Alibaba said would it was aiming to invest 380 billion yuan (about $53.4 billion) in AI infrastructure over the next three years. CEO Eddie Wu said this spending is seen rising even further, although he did not commit to a new figure.
Meanwhile, at its annual conference, the firm launched Qwen3-Max, a language model with more than 1 trillion parameters, which Alibaba CFO Zhou Jingren says excels in code generation and autonomous agent tasks. Parameters are variables that can help to determine how an AI model processes data.
Other new products revealed included Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal system designed for immersive experiences such as virtual reality and intelligent car cockpits, underscoring Alibaba’s ambition to expand AI beyond chatbots.
Elsewhere, Alibaba said it had notched a partnership with U.S. semiconductor titan Nvidia to develop physical AI capabilities in areas like data synthesis, environmental simulation reinforcement learning and model training.
Following the event, analysts at BofA Securities raised their price target on the ADRs to $195 from $168.
"Eyeing the huge opportunity in the new ASI era, the company positions itself as a world’s leading full-stack AI services provider to offer best-class large models, global AI cloud network, as well as open and developer friendly ecosystem," analyst Joyce Ju said while reiterating a Buy rating on the stock.
(Ayushman Ojha, Frank DeMatteo and Reuters contributed reporting.)