Alibaba Rises Over 3% Pre-Market as AI Chip and Cloud Infrastructure Plans Boost Market Expectations

TradingKey - In Tuesday's U.S. pre-market trading, Alibaba (BABA) shares rose by about 3.5% at one point, as the company unveiled an AI roadmap from chips and cloud infrastructure to large models at the 2026 Hangzhou Apsara Conference, further reinforcing market expectations for Alibaba Cloud's long-term growth.

Source: TradingView

Alibaba Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu stated that enterprise demand for AI computing power is growing rapidly, and the company will continue to increase infrastructure investment, aiming to expand total capacity of global data centers operated by Alibaba Cloud to over 20 GW by 2032. Under this plan, Alibaba will establish a complete AI technology system covering chips, servers, cloud platforms, foundation models, and AI agent applications. An official announcement from Alibaba Cloud noted that 20 GW is a future-oriented operational capacity target, not its current built-out scale.

On the chip front, Alibaba's semiconductor unit T-Head released its next-generation AI processor, Zhenwu V900, with performance reaching three times that of the previous-generation Zhenwu M890. Equipped with 216 GB of video memory and inter-chip bandwidth of 1,200 GB per second, the chip supports both large model training and inference, with mass production and commercial deployment scheduled for the first quarter of 2027. The company expects shipment scale for the Zhenwu series chips to increase significantly as cloud AI demand continues to expand.

Alibaba also disclosed that its next-generation Qwen 4 model is currently under training, with parameter scales for subsequent Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 series models expected to reach 5 trillion to 10 trillion. By concurrently advancing self-developed chips, hyperscale data centers, and foundation models, Alibaba hopes to reduce AI computing costs and enhance Alibaba Cloud's competitiveness in training, inference, and enterprise AI agent services.

Citi believes Alibaba is well-positioned to be a major beneficiary of expanding AI demand. The 20 GW capacity target for 2032 proposed by Wu corresponds to Alibaba's infrastructure scale at the end of fiscal year 2033. Based on this, Citi estimates that the company's external cloud revenue could reach $160 billion by then, significantly above its current forecast of $100 billion for fiscal year 2031.