Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu has doubled down on plans to expand Alibaba Cloud globally.

Speaking at a corporate event last week, Wu told attendees that the company was aiming to develop a "unified global cloud network," and would invest 380 billion yuan ($52.7bn) in doing so.

As reported by the Alibaba-owned South China Morning Post, the company seeks to "accelerate" the build-out of its cloud network in Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, with the aim of giving Chinese companies consistent AI infrastrcture services, both in their home country and abroad.

At present, Alibaba Cloud operates 87 availability zones across 29 regions. This year so far has seen Alibaba launch a region in Mexico, and a second data center in Thailand.

The company's capex plans were first shared in February of this year, but have been reiterated in the wake of increasing tensions between the US and China regarding AI hardware.

The US has long limited China's access to advanced AI chips, resulting in the likes of Nvidia announcing the H20 GPUs in 2023 - a less sophisticated version of the H100 chips - for the Chinese marketplace.

However, in April 2025, the US government imposed additional restrictions on exports of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China, much to Nvidia's ire, which said that it would cost the company approximately $5.5 billion in charges associated with H20 products for inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves, as well as forcing Nvidia to walk away from $15bn in sales as a result of the new restrictions.

By developing the global cloud network, Alibaba can enable its Chinese customers to still access AI infrastructure abroad. Other Chinese companies, including ByteDance, have reportedly used abroad locations as a loophole to access Nvidia chips outside of China.

Earlier this year, and after Alibaba had revealed its capex plans, the company's chairman Joe Tsai criticized the heavy investment in data centers for AI by US hyperscalers, saying at the time: "I start to see the beginning of some kind of bubble.”

He added: “I start to get worried when people are building data centers on spec. There are a number of people coming up, funds coming out, to raise billions or millions of capital.”

For comparison, Microsoft has pledged $80 billion in spending, Amazon $100bn (including warehouses), Google $75bn, and Meta expects between $60 and 65bn.

Alibaba sees cloud revenue driven by AI in most recent quarter

This month also saw Alibaba releasing its earnings results for the quarter ending March 31, 2025.

The Alibaba Cloud segment saw its revenue grow 18 percent year-over-year (YoY) to $4.152bn, which the company put down to "strong demand for AI."

The company's "AI-related product revenue" maintained triple-digit YoY growth for the seventh consecutive quarter, with the company noting adoption by sectors including retail, manufacturing, and media.

Speaking with analysts during the earnings call, CEO Wu said: "A lot of the companies that started out initially adopting AI were ones in the Internet space or Internet finance... But what we're seeing now is a lot of new scenarios and a lot of newer kinds of companies in other sectors that are taking up AI services," adding that AI is proving to be a "powerful impetus to migrate onto the cloud."

No mention of the company's global expansion plans, nor capex, was made.