Alibaba’s shares jumped nearly 10% in Hong Kong and US premarket trading on Wednesday after the Chinese tech giant announced a partnership with Nvidia, new AI products, and plans for a major expansion of its global data center network.

Speaking at the company’s annual Apsara Conference, CEO Eddie Wu said AI had become a core business priority alongside e-commerce, adding that “the industry’s demand for AI infrastructure has far exceeded our expectations.” Earlier this year, Alibaba pledged to invest 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) in AI infrastructure over the next three years.

The firm stated that it would collaborate with Nvidia to develop capabilities in data synthesis, model training, simulation, and testing.

It also plans to open its first data centers in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, with additional facilities to follow in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai, thereby expanding its footprint beyond the current 91 centers in 29 regions.

Alibaba also unveiled its largest AI model yet, Qwen3-Max, which contains more than one trillion parameters and boasts strengths in code generation and autonomous agent functions.

The company said the model outperformed rivals, including Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1, in some benchmarks.

Other products showcased included Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal system for virtual and augmented reality applications.

The announcements come as global competition in AI intensifies, with Nvidia recently striking a $100bn deal with OpenAI.