Alibaba Prices $10.2 Billion Share Placement to Fund AI Push

Alibaba Group is positioning artificial intelligence as a new growth engine alongside its core e-commerce operations, committing capital to chips, foundation models and cloud infrastructure. The financing underscores the intensifying race among Chinese technology companies to secure computing capacity and enterprise customers. It follows the Aug. 3, 2026, launch of Qwen3.8-Max, Alibaba’s flagship model with 2.4 trillion total parameters and 95 billion active parameters, which received a strong market response.

Alibaba said on Aug. 23 it had priced the new shares at HK$112.70 each, raising HK$80 billion ($10.2 billion) to fund AI chips, infrastructure and model development. The placement price represented an 8.4% discount to the previous trading day’s close and marked the largest primary follow-on offering by a Hong Kong-listed company. Alibaba’s Hong Kong shares fell as much as 10% on Aug. 24 as investors weighed dilution and the timeline for returns from its heavy AI spending.