Alibaba will increase investment in AI and partner with Nvidia. Shares soared

Shares of Chinese holding company Alibaba, which owns Aliexpress, reached a four-year high in New York and Hong Kong. The company at its Apsara conference announced increased investment in artificial intelligence, a partnership with Nvidia and plans to expand its network of data centers around the world. CEO Eddie Wu emphasized Alibaba Cloud's strategy as a full-service AI provider and unveiled its new Qwen3-Max language model, which has already performed better in tests than competitors.

Alibaba's depositary receipts soared 8% to $176.2 at the opening of trading in New York. This became their maximum since October 2021. The company's papers are heading for the longest weekly growth streak on the NYSE since the beginning of 2020 - eight weeks in a row, writes Barron's. If this pace can be maintained, Alibaba's quotes will show the best calendar year since 2017, the publication adds.

At the end of trading on September 24 in Hong Kong, the company's shares rose by almost 10%, which also became their maximum for four years. Since the beginning of the year, the company's market value has increased by 100%.

The growth of quotations was supported by several news from Alibaba related to artificial intelligence. At its annual Apsara conference, the company's CEO Eddie Wu said it will increase spending on AI beyond the 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) announced in February, Reuters reports. "Total investment in AI over the next five years will exceed $4 trillion - the largest investment in computing power and research and development in history," Wu said, emphasizing Alibaba Cloud's strategy as a "full-service AI provider."

In addition, the Chinese company said it will collaborate with US chipmaker Nvidia to develop AI solutions, including model training, simulations and testing. Alibaba announced the opening of data centers in Brazil, France, the Netherlands, as well as plans to expand networks in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Dubai. Alibaba's network now consists of 91 data centers in 29 regions around the world, Reuters notes. "The speed of development of the AI industry has far exceeded our expectations, as well as the demand for AI infrastructure," said CEO Wu. However, the company did not specify whether the new facilities would be powered by Nvidia chips, Reuters notes.

Alibaba also unveiled the largest language model, Qwen3-Max, with more than a trillion parameters. According to Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren, it is particularly strong in code generation and creating autonomous agents - AI that requires fewer prompts and can act on its own to achieve user goals. In independent tests, Qwen3-Max performed better than Anthropic's Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1, the company assures. The basic version of Qwen3 was released in April, and among other new products, Alibaba introduced the Qwen3-Omni multimodal system for VR/AR applications - from smart glasses to smart car dashboards.

On Wednesday, a BofA analyst raised his target price on Alibaba shares from $169 to $195 and reiterated a buy recommendation, TipRanks reports. BofA's new target implies a nearly 20% increase in the company's market value from its Sept. 23 close. The investment bank analyst noted that after the conference, Alibaba has consolidated its position as the world's leading full-service AI provider and is aggressively ramping up investments in preparation for the era of artificial superintelligence.

92% of analysts tracking the dynamics of Alibaba securities advise investors to buy them (Buy and Overweight ratings). The rest are neutral with Hold rating, and there are no recommendations to sell.

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