Alibaba working on “super AI cloud” to prepare for what’s next

Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu has said the company is investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure to prepare for artificial superintelligence (ASI) that’s expected to surpass human capabilities.

Wu was speaking at the 2025 World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, eastern China, where he said the company is building ultra-large-scale AI infrastructure and ramping up investment in its global “super AI cloud,” according to Chinese media reports.

Wu said Alibaba is pushing ahead to prepare for the next phase of artificial intelligence development. He told the conference that the world is entering the era of artificial general intelligence (AGI), where AI agents assist humans in digital and physical tasks.

The next milestone, he said, will be ASI, or systems capable of self-learning and ultimately surpassing human intelligence, even though that stage remains “far off.”

Wu said that Alibaba aims to become a leading provider of AI services to global developers. The company is in the middle of its largest-ever overseas investment drive, with new data centers planned in Brazil, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and other locations.

Like its American counterpart Amazon, Alibaba is undergoing a transformation into a cloud computing and AI company while expanding internationally, as it deals with a slowing e-commerce business and increasing competition in China.

Its flagship AI model, Qwen, competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, as well as Chinese rivals such as Baidu’s Ernie and Tencent’s Hunyuan.

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Alibaba’s boss previously said he expects China to enter an intelligent economy and society by around 2035. Speaking at another conference in September, Wu said that achieving AGI is now a certainty, but self-improving, human-surpassing ASI was the ultimate goal.

Achieving AGI alone will free humans from 80% of daily work, he said at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou. He also said that Alibaba’s spending on AI infrastructure will exceed the originally planned 38 billion yuan ($53 billion) over the next three years.

The company declared AGI as its “primary objective” earlier this year.