Alibaba Cloud is reportedly considering increasing its planned three-year capex investment in AI infrastructure to $69.05bn (480 billion yuan).

As reported by Chinese media outlet LatePost, and citing an unnamed "insider," this would be an increase on the previously promised $52.4 billion (380 billion yuan), stated by the company in early 2025.

When it was announced, the spending commitment was for "the next three years," or by February 2028.

During the company's November earnings call, Alibaba revealed that in the last 12 months it had spent around $16 billion on AI-related purchases, including data centers, suggesting that we can expect capex to continue to ramp up over the next couple of years - even more so should the company expand its plans.

According to LatePost, Alibaba's strategies to expand its capacity have been creative, with the insider telling the publication that at some points the company "even bought large quantities of consumer-grade graphics cards like the RTX 4090 to build inference clusters and supplement inference throughput."

The company has also sought to improve the operational efficiency of the hardware it has, claiming in October 2025 that it could reduce GPU use by 82 percent with its "pooling" system.

News that Alibaba might seek to increase its capex plan comes shortly after the Chinese government granted ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent permission to purchase Nvidia H200 chips. Between the three companies, they have approval to buy up to 400,000 of the GPUs.

Alibaba also has its own AI chips developed by its T-Head unit, the latest of which is the Zhenwu 810E chip.

Since revealing plans to ramp up investment last year, Alibaba has reportedly been seeking to raise funds through the sale of zero-coupon convertible bonds to the tune of $3.2 billion in September 2025. This came shortly after a $1.53bn bond raise in July, and the company has rapidly expanded its international footprint outside of China.

The company launched a third data center in Malaysia in July 2025 and a second data center in South Korea in June 2025. Other locations include a new region in Mexico and a second data center in Thailand.

In China, a recent report from Omdia said that Alibaba holds more than a third of the local AI cloud market. As reported by SCMP, Alibaba Cloud held a 35.8 percent market share. In second place was ByteDance's Volcano Engine with just 14.8 percent.

ByteDance reportedly plans to spend $14 billion on Nvidia chips in 2026.