E-commerce company, Alibaba’s shares rose 9% on Wednesday after the company launched its largest-ever artificial intelligence model, the Qwen3-Max, with CEO Eddie Wu stating that he would lift the firm’s budget for Alibaba AI investment.
Alibaba had already pledged to invest 380 billion yuan (€45bn) in AI-related infrastructure over the next three years, seeking to stay ahead as firms race to develop new models but Wu did not give details on the additional expenditure.
Alibaba’s Qwen3-Max model
The Qwen3-Max model was launched during a company conference in Hangzhou where the firm’s chief technology officer, Zhou Jingren, said that the Qwen3-Max model contains more than 1 trillion parameters.
Alibaba claimed that its Qwen3-Max model outperformed rival offerings like Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in certain metrics, citing third-party benchmarks.
“The industry’s development speed far exceeded what we expected, and the industry’s demand for AI infrastructure also far exceeded our anticipation,” Wu said on Wednesday. “We are actively proceeding with the 380 billion investment in AI infrastructure, and plan to add more.”
Stressing that Alibaba must push ahead, Wu estimated that total global investment in AI will exceed $4 trillion (€3.4tn) in the next five years. Chinese rivals such as Tencent and JD.com, as well as US tech firms, have invested heavily in AI over the past year.
