Alibaba’s shares in Hong Kong soared by 14.56% on Friday following impressive quarterly earnings and a bold commitment to invest aggressively in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing over the next three years.
The tech giant reported an 8% increase in revenue, reaching 280 billion yuan ($38.6 billion) for the quarter ending December 2024, marking its fastest revenue growth in over a year.
In an earnings call on Thursday, CEO Eddie Wu announced plans to spend more on AI and cloud infrastructure in the next three years than the company has in the past decade combined. While he didn’t disclose exact figures, Alibaba’s capital investment for the nine months ended December 31 stood at 61.4 billion yuan.
Alibaba reported a 13% increase in cloud-related product revenues and continued triple-digit growth in AI-related product revenues for the October-December quarter of 2024. According to company filings, AI-related products have sustained triple-digit revenue growth for six consecutive quarters.
These results come amid a global surge in demand for AI computing power, especially after the popularization of DeepSeek’s advanced reasoning model earlier this year, which has made AI more accessible and efficient.
Alibaba is positioning itself not just as an infrastructure provider in the AI race but also as a direct competitor to companies like DeepSeek and OpenAI. The company recently announced a partnership with Apple to roll out AI features on the iPhone. Additionally, Alibaba has developed its own AI chatbot, Qwen, and has open-sourced various large language models under the Qwen family to attract developers to its platform.
Alibaba’s stock has surged more than 50% since the start of the year, reflecting investor confidence in its AI and cloud prospects.
Adding to the positive sentiment, Alibaba founder Jack Ma made a rare public appearance at a symposium on private enterprises alongside China’s top leaders on Monday, where Beijing showed full endorsement of the private sector—especially the tech sector.
The company’s strong performance is part of broader gains in the Chinese tech sector in 2025, as investors reassess the value of Chinese AI stocks relative to their global peers. On Monday, Tencent’s market value on the Hong Kong exchange soared to around HK$4.65 trillion, a three-year high after embracing DeepSeek for WeChat, its super app with nearly 1.4 billion monthly active users.
Since the start of the year, the Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index, which tracks dozens of Chinese companies listed on Wall Street, has gained 18.2%, outperforming the Nasdaq index’s mere 1.1% increase over the same period.
