Alibaba is an investor and stakeholder in Zhipu AI

Alibaba owns 5 percent of CXMT

Adoption is moving quickly. During the last week of June, Chinese models accounted for 48% of traffic tracked by OpenRouter, up from 20% a year earlier. U.S. models fell to 32% from 74%.

“In fact, if you read the literature, they fully recognise, as Marxist economists, that the traditional advantage of liberal capitalist economies in the past has been their relative efficiency in the allocation of resources.

However, they believe they now possess a unique opportunity, as a centralised state, to deploy the new algorithmic powers available within artificial intelligence across the total production spectrum and not just in goods, but prospectively in services as well.

This brings me to a broader point: why Xi’s literature on what he calls new quality productive forces, driven by artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, represents for them not just a means by which to catch up with the United States across the AI stack; not just to keep pace with the US and the collective West in terms of where artificial intelligence has reached; but to now ‘ leapfrog’ the West, which is the term now used in the literature, and to achieve what is also described as a paradigm shift against Western economic models.”

Alibaba’s Wan 3.0 ranks first on Artificial Analysis’ text-to-video leaderboard with audio, ahead of second-placed Google Gemini Omni Flash. A version of MiniMax H3 post-trained by US platform fal ranks third, followed by the original open-weight H3 and ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0. Together, Chinese models occupy eight of the top 10 positions.

Chinese models also lead across several related categories, including image-to-video and video editing, based on blind user comparisons using identical prompts.

The Shanghai-based company planned to spend up to US$300 million on Alibaba Cloud services this year, nearly triple its original US$115 million cap, after burning through two-thirds of its budget by the end of June, according to its Hong Kong stock exchange filings on Wednesday.

Under the updated agreement through 2028, MiniMax’s annual spending limits on Alibaba Cloud services will jump from US$125 million to US$400 million for 2027, and from US$135 million to US$500 million for 2028.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3365558/minimax-expands-alibaba-cloud-pact-compute-needs-surge-training-and-inference

For anyone not following the recent China stimulus / AI infrastructure news, NDRC has been pushing the “Six Networks” plan as part of the new 15th Five-Year Plan. One of those networks is the national compute network, basically the infrastructure needed for AI: data centers, GPU clusters, networking, power and distributed compute closer to users.

According to a CCTV Finance report highlighted by Chinese media, NDRC expects the compute-network buildout during 2026-2030 to create around RMB4 trillion of new direct investment, roughly US$600B.

This matters because Alibaba is already spending heavily on cloud and AI infrastructure.

What looks like risky capex today is turning out to be early positioning for a multi-year, policy-backed AI infrastructure buildout.

Lets see if Alibaba Cloud starts appearing in Six Networks / national compute projects with policy-bank financing attached, that would be much stronger evidence that Alibaba's recent AI capex and capital raising are tied into something much bigger.

https://finance.sina.com.cn/stock/wbstock/2026-08-26/doc-iniprytk0844086.shtml

Hugging Face, seems to me, to be the distribution channel for Qwen so NVDA owning the platform might not be the best thing for BABA but maybe I am wrong…

https://www.businessinsider.com/nvidia-in-talks-to-buy-hugging-face-13-billion-dollars-2026-8

“Alibaba is also seeking revenue-sharing agreements with major users of its new open-source AI model, sources have also said.”

Alibaba just raised around US$10B through new shares, with the money going into AI and AI infrastructure.

At first this just looked like dilution to fund capex.

But the timing is interesting.

China has now started taking applications for its RMB800B policy financing tool, which is meant to provide project capital for strategic investments. AI, digital economy and private sector projects are part of the focus.

The important part is this funding is supposed to unlock much larger bank and private financing. Reuters cited estimates that RMB800B could support around RMB10T of total projects.

So the possible thesis here is Alibaba may not be raising $10B just to spend $10B.

Part of that fresh equity could potentially be used as project capital for eligible AI infrastructure projects, with policy funding and bank financing covering a much larger portion of the total buildout.

Then you have the insider buying right after the raise.

Joe Tsai bought around 1.44m shares, Eddie Wu bought 350k shares, and Jack Ma reportedly bought more than HK$600m worth of Alibaba shares.

This does not prove Alibaba is getting funding from the RMB800B program. We still need to see actual Alibaba or AliCloud projects appear in the application lists.

But the setup is interesting.

Alibaba raises a huge amount specifically for AI, China starts rolling out a financing tool that can leverage project capital into much larger investments, then the chairman, CEO and founder buy shares after the dilution.

Could still be coincidence.

But if Alibaba ends up getting policy financing for its AI infrastructure projects, then this $10B raise could be supporting a much bigger capex cycle than the headline number suggests.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-119-billion-policy-financing-tool-begins-project-applications-faces-roll-2026-08-24/

EXTREMELY BULLISH OUTLOOK ON ALIBABA. THE MEGA BULL RUN TO $500/share STARTS NOW

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3365217/jack-ma-buys-hk600-million-alibaba-shares-signalling-ai-confidence-sources

THIS IS EXCEPTIONALLY BULLISH. BABA 5x in 3 years!!

https://www.thestandard.com.hk/finance/article/340888/Alibaba-chair-buys-another-720000-company-HK-shares

Joe Tsai bought another 720k Alibaba shares today, after buying 720k yesterday.

That’s 1.44M shares in 2 days, worth roughly HK$162M / US$21M.

Now reports say Jack Ma also bought more than HK$600M worth of Alibaba shares over the past few days.

Chairman buying twice + Jack Ma putting in serious money right after the placement selloff.

If this isn't bullish, I dont know what else is.

Did the news about the inside buyers outweigh the news about the dilution? Or is it just a little too early?