Alibaba Cloud invests $53 billion in artificial intelligence to drive AI infrastructure, cloud computing and LLMs as Alibaba Group ADR stock increases.

Like its U.S. counterparts, Alibaba is going all-in on generative AI. Its cloud computing business saw an 11 percent year-over-year increase in revenue in December 2024. AI-related product sales have experienced triple-digit growth for the sixth consecutive quarter, signaling strong enterprise demand for AI-powered solutions.

Alibaba has unveiled a new open-source AI reasoning model, the QwQ-32B, which it claims outperforms DeepSeek's R1 and OpenAI 's o1-mini. Despite having just 32 billion parameters versus R1's 671 billion, QwQ-32B has demonstrated better performance in math, coding and general problem-solving.

U.S.-listed shares of Alibaba Group Holding (BABA) rose more than 8% on Thursday and were climbing in after-hours trading after the Chinese e-commerce giant posted quarterly results, with retail sentiment staying bullish.

China’s e-commerce leader, which in 2025 jumped to the forefront of the domestic AI sector with highly benchmarked models, on Thursday open-sourced the QwQ-32B model. The platform marked a big leap over the previous version using roughly 5% of the parameters, or data units, that DeepSeek’s R1 employs.

The group said its Alibaba Cloud unit has recorded triple-digit AI-related product revenue growth for six consecutive quarters.

The Chinese technology giant first mentioned the plan last week when it reported results but didn’t provide a specific figure.

CEO Eddie Wu said Alibaba will ‘aggressively invest’ in AI infrastructure and bolster research and development on advanced new AI models.

Beyond its home turf, Alibaba is expanding its international e-commerce businesses to diversify away from its reliance on its home market. This segment has been growing rapidly lately, with revenue up by 32% year over year in the latest quarter. In other words, Alibaba is making solid strides in rejuvenating the growth of its e-commerce businesses.

Alibaba Group has highlighted that it has been focusing more on these two sectors lately, with plans to integrate artificial intelligence across several of its divisions such as e-commerce and consumer applications.

The latest earnings report from Alibaba Group highlights resilience in key segments, led by cloud and international commerce growth.

Alibaba Group Holding's cloud computing arm has introduced its updated artificial intelligence (AI) model, Animate Anyone 2, which the company touts as simplifying the animation of lifelike characters with just a static image and one video cue.