Cloud and AI: Alibaba to Invest €30 Billion in 2025

Global AI leadership will be earned just as much through large language models as through raw computing power. And despite American trade frictions, China is signaling a firm intention to take a leading role in the international race, with Alibaba positioned at the forefront. The Chinese giant has just unveiled its response to the United States’ investment announcements with Stargate and to Europe via the EU AI Champions initiative: €30 billion (about ¥380 billion) over three years. “This amount will surpass Alibaba’s total investment in cloud infrastructure and AI over the past decade,” the company said in a press release.

Alibaba does not specify whether the investments will be concentrated in China or if a portion will benefit the countries where its Cloud subsidiary is already present. According to various specialist consultancy firms, Alibaba Cloud is the fourth-largest provider globally, with an estimated market share between 4% and 6%. For its fiscal third quarter, which ended in December, its revenue rose by 13% to $4.3 billion.

Investments Smaller Than Those of Its American Competitors

Alibaba is also an AI model developer, operating under the name Alibaba Qwen, very active but somewhat under the media radar. In the wake of the high-profile DeepSeek arrival, the company highlighted the performance of its LLMs. Yet this startup carries a notably high profile. On X, it is followed by 932,000 followers, compared with only 56,000 for Alibaba Qwen.

However, the Chinese group’s announcement remains well behind the investments of its American rivals. Since the start of the year, the world’s three leading players in public cloud have been making a flurry of announcements to maintain their market position: $100 billion for AWS, $80 billion for Microsoft, and $75 billion for Google. Meta, for its part, has unveiled a plan of $65 billion to develop its LLama family of large language models.