Alibaba Group on Monday weighed in with its own mega-money bid in the artificial intelligence (AI) sweepstakes: It plans to spend $52.4 billion on AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years.
The massive expenditure exceeds the online retailer’s AI and cloud computing investment over the past decade, and is yet another big splash by a Chinese tech giant pursuing AI business amid a global race with the U.S. ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, that has committed some $20.7 billion in capital expenditure for 2025, much of which will be on AI, Reuters reported in late January.
DeepSeek, a homegrown startup in China, recently stirred waves worldwide with its low-cost, high-performance open-source model.
Earlier this month, Alibaba co-founder, Joe Tsai said its technology will be integrated into Apple Inc.’s iPhones. In January, Alibaba unveiled the latest version of its AI model, Qwen2.5 Max. It claims the model is comparable in performance with high-end models, including DeepSeek-V3.
Alibaba’s all-in bet on AI comes after the company recently reported its fastest revenue growth since 2023, driven in large part by e-commerce and cloud demand. What is more, the spending commitment reflects confidence in China’s economic rebound and the country’s AI boom.
AI’s costly arms race extends to the U.S., and some hefty capital expenditure plans for tech’s biggest players.
On Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company will plow more than $500 billion over the next four years to finance AI silicon engineering and double its advanced manufacturing fund to $10 billion. The $500 billion commitment includes Apple Intelligence infrastructure, data centers, and Apple TV+ productions. As part of the spending spree, Apple said it plans to hire about 20,000 people, most of whom will focus on research and development, silicon engineering, software development, AI, and machine learning.
During their recent quarterly results, Big Tech outlined plans to spend lavishly on AI, led by Amazon.com Inc.’s $100 billion commitment. In all, Amazon, Microsoft Corp., Google, and Meta Platforms Inc. plan to lay out $320 billion this year on AI-related projects, up from $246 billion in 2024, and $151 billion in 2023.
Indeed, a large cross-section of business leaders and IT decision-makers intend to triple AI spending from a year ago, accounting for nearly 20% of their IT budgets, according to new IDC research commissioned by Lenovo. The report, titled “It’s Time for AI-nomics,” is based on the opinions of more than 2,900 IT and business leaders worldwide.
