Alibaba Group Holding plans to increase its capital expenditures on artificial intelligence infrastructure from the original 380 billion yuan (US$53 billion) over the next three years, the group’s CEO said on Wednesday.
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Eddie Wu Yongming, also the chairman of Alibaba Cloud, said at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, that Alibaba’s cloud unit aimed to become “the world’s leading full-stack AI service provider” from computing power to models. Wu did not, however, disclose the additional budget for AI infrastructure spending.
Alibaba’s shares gained 7.8 per cent to HK$171.80 as of 1.45pm on Wednesday. Alibaba owns the Post.
Wu’s pledge came as Alibaba is seeing surging demand for AI services and “an increasingly clear technology trajectory” from AI agents to AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ASI (artificial super intelligence) as he laid out the company’s “road map to ASI”.
AGI refers to a hypothetical type of AI that reaches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities, while ASI refers to an even more powerful future form of AI with intellectual scope far beyond human intelligence. US AI giants from OpenAI to Meta have all made achieving ASI an explicit goal.
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“AGI will not be the end but a new beginning,” Wu said. The technology would save humans from 80 per cent of existing jobs, and the arrival of ASI would create “a group of super scientists and engineers” to solve problems from healthcare to climate change in “unthinkable ways”, he said.
